The movie "A Minecraft Movie" (the movie specifically for Minecraft) has continued to haul in some absurd cash—hitting $150 million in its first opening weekend, and inspiring a wave of problematic popcorn-hurling behaviour as it takes the box office by storm.
It's shown no signs of slowing down—its worldwide haul is now at $552 million, putting it on pace to, potentially, dethrone the 2023 Super Mario Bros movie as the highest-earning videogame adaptation of all time.
It's a little hard to get the week-by-week play-by-play for worldwide ticket sales, since different countries report their returns at different times. However, if we go off domestic cash? A Minecraft Movie is certainly in with a chance of beating everyone's favourite plumber.
After 10 days at the Box Office, The Super Mario Bros Movie had raked in $283,480,285 at the domestic box office. Meanwhile, A Minecraft Movie is breathing down its neck, with $278,864,857 earned in the US.
Whether or not A Minecraft Movie will keep enough momentum to overtake Super Mario Bros is another question entirely: Here's the daily domestic play-by-play courtesy of boxofficemojo.com. As you can see, A Minecraft Movie had a sharper domestic falloff during weekdays, whereas the Super Mario Bros movie was still pulling numbers throughout. Mario also had the advantage of his cinematic debut falling on Easter Sunday, whereas Minecraft won't enjoy that box office boom until this weekend.
Part of me wonders if that's due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The US wouldn't declare an end to it until May 2023, but restrictions were still winding down at that point. In theory, that means the Super Mario Bros. benefitted from a bigger pool of theatre-goers caught in the venn diagram of 'I've got time to kill, because I'm either unemployed or furloughed' and restrictions that were already winding down.
It really is going to be a fascinating race. It's easy to forget that, in the face of Minecraft's worldwide presence (and the movie's made-in-a-lab marketability), this is still a game that started out as a little indie survival number. I remember an age when it was still spreading through word-of-mouth with popular youtubers.
To chart its journey from that, into a world-wide phenomenon that can go toe-to-toe with one of gaming's oldest mascots at the box office? It's, quite frankly, wild. No wonder Warner Bros is making a sequel.
