Hollywood’s video game genre is getting a box office redemption arc

Over the weekend, Mario, Luigi, Bowser, and the rest of Nintendo’s iconic crew traipsed around the solar system and smashed their way to the top of the box office in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie.

It’s the latest sign that Hollywood and moviegoers have changed their tune on video game adaptations. 

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (a sequel to 2023’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie) opened on April 8, just in time for the lead-up to Easter weekend.

According to studio estimates cited by CNBC, the Illumination and Nintendo co-production earned $130.9 million over the weekend and $190.1 million in its first five days in North American theaters. Tack on an estimated $182.4 million from overseas markets, and the film grossed around $372.5 million worldwide. 

It was a head-turning initial run that qualifies as the biggest box office debut since Avatar: Fire and Ash opened in 2025, and the second biggest for a movie based on a video game, trailing only The Super Mario Bros. Movie.

More broadly, it’s another example in a recent series of financially lucrative video game movies—and it shows that the subgenre might be officially getting a box office redemption arc.

An uphill battle for video game adaptations

Less than a decade ago, video-game-to-movie adaptations were considered a gamble at best and a surefire road to fan disappointment at worst. 

Around the late 2010s, plenty of studios had tried their hands at a video game movie, but no one had seemed to quite turn the genre into a winning formula, despite its obvious potential for mining recognizable IP.

Several memorable box office flops had soured audiences on the concept, including 1993’s catastrophic live-action Super Mario Bros., the total bomb that was 2005’s Alone in the Dark, and 2016’s lackluster Assassin’s Creed. 

Other attempts, like 2016’s Warcraft, saw middling success in North American markets but stronger showings overseas.

Box office hits like 2001’s Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and 2016’s The Angry Birds Movie were rare successes in a sea of underperforming brethren. One 2017 article in the Guardian addressed the elephant in the room head-on: “Movie adaptations of video games are still mostly terrible,” its headline read. “Why has no one cracked the code?”

For every Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and The Angry Birds Movie there were an equal number of big flops, the story argued.

“Studios clearly feel that the international box office returns are enough to justify the investment [but] they are all hoping to be the lucky winner to crack the code and become the next superhero-like genre to break out and generate billions of dollars,” Paul Dergarabedian, a senior media analyst at Comscore, explained in the piece. “[It] just hasn’t happened, yet.”

In recent years, that long-awaited breakout moment appears to have arrived. 

The great video game movie Renaissance

Looking back, the first sign was 2019’s Pokémon Detective Pikachu.

The film, starring a live-action Ryan Reynolds alongside an animated Pikachu, grossed about $433 million worldwide during its run in theaters, earning the spot as the largest video game movie debut of all time up until that point.

For both studios and theaters, the movie served as proof that it was possible to successfully adapt beloved video game IP into something that both kids and parents would be interested in watching.

Since then, it seems, the floodgates have officially opened.

Sonic the Hedgehog has gotten three movie adaptations from 2020 to 2023, each of which was a major financial success. In 2023, The Super Mario Bros. Movie made more than $375 million around the world during its opening weekend and netted a whopping $1.36 billion after its full run.

Most recently, in 2025, A Minecraft Movie not only scored nearly $1 billion worldwide, but also captured the cultural zeitgeist through a series of meme-able moments that turned every screening into a new marketing opportunity. 

Now, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie seems poised to be the next video-game-to-movie success story. Already, its broken box office records in 2026 and helped AMC to notch one of its most lucrative weekends of all time.

“It’s exactly the kind of broad, crowd-pleasing release that brings people into theatres,” Adam Aron, AMC’s CEO, said of the film in a statement to ABC News.

In 2017, Dergarabedian predicted that the video game film genre would need a “consistent string of hits” to justify it as a true blockbuster genre. And in 2026, that threshold is finally within reach. 

That’s not to say that all of these films will be critically acclaimed—A Minecraft Movie and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie both have sub-50% ratings on Rotten Tomatoes, for example—but when it comes to butts in seats, video game IP is paying off for Hollywood at last.

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