The animated Super Mario Bros Movie has shot to the top of the global box office, taking $377m (£304m) worldwide on its opening weekend.
The new film is an origin story about how Brooklyn plumbers Mario, voiced by Chris Pratt, and Luigi (Charlie Day), fall into a rogue pipe and wind up in a world populated by Nintendo’s most famous characters.
Critics have largely delivered a cold shower for the film, but family audiences eager for Easter entertainment have attended en masse anyway. US cinemas recorded $204.6m in box office sales, with a further $173m totted up overseas.
This means Mario has broken the record for opening weekends for both video game adaptations (beating Warcraft’s $210m) and animated films (beating Frozen 2’s $358m).
It also makes it the biggest opening of the year, bumping Ant-Man into second place, and the second biggest three-day US animated opening (behind Finding Dory).
The success of the film has been credited by some US exhibitors to the breadth of its reach, with exit polls charting that 59% of the audience was male and 45% were between 18 and 34. Fifteen per cent of the film’s US takings were from 3D screenings.
Other solid performers over the holiday weekend were Ben Affleck’s Nike film Air, John Wick: Chapter 4 and Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.
