After opening on April 28 in Japan, The Super Mario Bros. Movie has hit the JPY10 billion ($71 million) milestone in just 31 days the quickest ever by a non-Japanese animation in the Japanese market.
In the latest three-day period from May 28 to 28, the film earned JPY632 million ($4.5 million), bringing its cumulative box office to JPY10.1 billion ($71.7 million), according to figures supplied by distributor Toho-Towa.
Based on an iconic Japanese game series, The Super Mario Bros. Movie currently ranks third all-time at the worldwide box office for animated films, behind Frozen and Frozen II.
Toho-Towa has not issued a final earnings forecast for the film. And the title still has a way to go to catch Japans all-time box office leader, the locally-produced Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba The Movie: Mugen Train. That earned JPY40.4 billion ($288 million) in 2020.
Virtually absent from Japanese screens at the height of the pandemic and slow to return as the disease waned, Hollywood films grabbed a nearly 30% market share last year and are on the upswing this year, as the success of Mario underlines. Among most-anticipated releases this summer is The Little Mermaid, Rob Marshalls live-action version of the 1989 animated hit.
Set for release on June 9 in Japan by Disney, the film is also predicted to reach the JPY10 billion mark, according to veteran entertainment analyst Saito Hiroaki, writing on the Yahoo! Japan website. Previous live-action versions of classic Disney animations like Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin did splendid business in Japan with the former earning JPY12.4 billion ($88 million) in 2017 and the latter JPY12.1 billion ($86 million) in 2019.
Also, notes Saito, the controversy in the U.S. and China over the casting of Halle Bailey in the live-action remake doesnt carry over to Japan. If you think about it calmly, he writes, Ariel is a mermaid who lives in the sea world. There is no need to faithfully reproduce the hair and skin color of the animated version.