The Super Mario Galaxy Movie needed $375 million to match The Super Mario Bros. Movie's global opening weekend. It got $372.6 million. Two and a half million dollars separated it from history, which is either a near-miss worth celebrating or a footnote depending on how you look at it. Honestly, it's both.
According to NBCUniversal, the film's five-day global debut lands it as the second-best opening in Illumination's history and the second-biggest launch ever for a video game movie. In both cases, only the 2023 original beats it. The US market alone contributed roughly $190 million of that total, with international audiences making up the rest. For context, that also makes it the best five-day opening weekend since Moana 2 in 2024.
Close, But Not Quite
The gap is genuinely striking when you sit with it. $2.4 million across a global theatrical release is noise. That's one mid-sized city having a slow weekend. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie didn't underperform; it ran a near-identical race to one of the most successful animated films ever made and lost by a rounding error. The real story here isn't that it fell short, it's that the sequel to a record-breaking film came within breathing distance of matching it, which almost never happens.
Critics weren't exactly kind to the film, but audiences clearly didn't care. Rotten Tomatoes has audience approval sitting at 89 percent, and CinemaScore handed it an A-, which is the kind of number that tells studios the crowd leaving the theatre is happy. Nintendo, Universal, and Illumination will be reading that A- as a green light for a threequel, and they'd be right to.
What makes this opening more impressive is the lack of a direct competitor. There's no other heavyweight animated film in the same release window, so Galaxy had room to breathe. But even accounting for that, pulling $372.6 million in five days is a number most studios would trade their entire slate for. Project Hail Mary briefly held the 2026 record before this landed; it won't be holding it back.
On the creative side, the film has generated its own buzz beyond the box office. Fox McCloud's appearance was one of the bigger surprises, and the animator who led the 2D Fox intro sequence shared some details on X, including a shoutout to original Fox character designer Takaya Imamura. There's more to the sequence than has been discussed publicly, the animator noted they're not able to talk more in-depth about the creation of Fox's intro right now, which only makes it more interesting. You can get a look at the official teaser on YouTube if you want to see what the fuss is about.
The $2.4 million gap will be a trivia answer someday. What matters now is that the Galaxy Movie has no serious animated competition on the immediate horizon, word of mouth is strong, and the franchise has now produced two of the biggest animated openings in cinema history back to back. A third film isn't a question of if at this point.
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