Universal and Illumination’s animated sequel is on track for a $1 billion-to-$1.1 billion finish — by any normal measure a hit. By the standards set by 2023’s $1.36 billion phenomenon, it’s the franchise’s first cold splash.
When The Super Mario Galaxy Movie opened on April 1, 2026, the assumption inside Universal’s distribution offices was simple: this was a coronation. Two and a half years earlier, the 2023 Super Mario Bros. Movie had become the second-highest-grossing film of 2023 behind Barbie, the highest-grossing video game movie in history, and the first such adaptation to cross the billion-dollar line — racing past it in just 26 days. The sequel, with an expanded scope, the Galaxy IP behind it, Yoshi finally on the marquee, and Fox McCloud crashing in as the franchise’s most prominent cross-property cameo to date, was supposed to do what Frozen 2, Despicable Me 2 and Incredibles 2 did before it: take the same audience and squeeze it harder.
Instead, six weekends in, the picture has crossed $941.2 million worldwide against a $110 million production budget. It’s the year’s biggest movie globally. It is, by any honest measure, a hit. And it is also, somehow, becoming the story of how a Mario movie can disappoint.
The opening was big. The hold was the problem.
The five-day debut — $190.8 million domestically, $373 million globally — was the largest of 2026 and the fourth-biggest five-day domestic frame in history, behind Moana 2, the original Mario and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. The international launch landed within hailing distance of the first film’s like-for-likes. CinemaScore handed it an A- (the first film got an A), and audiences gave it an 89 percent on Rotten Tomatoes’ Popcornmeter.
Then came weekend two.
Where the 2023 Super Mario Bros. Movie held to a negative 37 percent drop — the second-best second weekend ever for an animated film at the time, behind only Frozen II — Galaxy fell 48 percent, to $69 million. That’s still a solid number. It’s also the gap between a film legging out to $1.36 billion and one squeezing toward $1 billion with the parking brake on. By the end of the second frame, Galaxy trailed the original’s domestic pace by roughly $45 million. The deficit hasn’t closed since. Through six weekends, the domestic total stands at roughly $407 million — short of the original’s $574.9 million finish, and unlikely to close that distance even with a long tail and a digital release set for May 20.
The reviews this time actually landed
The 2023 film had its own ugly opening with critics — a 59 percent Tomatometer that Miyamoto himself, in a now-famous post-mortem, credited with generating useful publicity. Audiences ignored the reviews; the film cleared a billion in under a month. The thinking inside Illumination was that the formula was bulletproof: critics would shrug, kids would line up, brand affinity would do the rest.
This time, the critics didn’t shrug — they sharpened. Galaxy landed at roughly 43 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, a meaningful drop from a number that was already mediocre. Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman, who liked the first one, called the sequel one of the worst animated films of the year. The RogerEbert.com review described it as “it’s-a mediocre.” The Rotten Tomatoes consensus settled on “colorful world-building that’s as frenetic as it is weightless.” Even the typically generous Nintendo Life review framed it as “faithful but overstuffed.”
In an interview with the Japanese magazine Famitsu this spring, Miyamoto admitted he had genuinely expected Galaxy to review better than the first one and was surprised it didn’t. That’s a candid acknowledgement from a producer who normally treats critical reception as background noise. The mechanism is straightforward enough: the audience that brought their kids to the first Mario movie out of curiosity in 2023 has now seen the trick. A 41 percent score doesn’t kill a movie — but combined with a half-point CinemaScore dip and a worse second-weekend hold, it strangles word-of-mouth right when a film needs it most. The 2023 film grew. The 2026 film is sustaining.
China is the international ghost in the machine
The first Super Mario Bros. Movie did roughly $102 million in China — a number that looked modest at the time and looks enormous now. The sequel, through three weekends in the territory, sat at $17.1 million, in line with the original’s pace at that benchmark but in a market that has substantially decoupled from the Hollywood release schedule. The dominant Chinese hit of 2026 to date is the domestic race-car film Pegasus 3, which has cleared $647.8 million without crossing the Pacific. The Hollywood share of the Chinese theatrical market, narrow to begin with, is narrower than the studios modeled in 2023. Galaxy has not been a Chinese miss — it’s been the latest evidence that the China line item on a Hollywood projection is now a fraction of what it used to be.
Japan, which timed its release to Golden Week, has played to expectations but has not been the late-stage rocket that the first film’s Japanese launch was. The original’s Japanese run added meaningful late-cycle revenue that helped push the global total past $1.3 billion. Galaxy‘s Japanese cume is healthy but not transformative.
The novelty problem is real, and it was foreseeable
Before Galaxy opened, BoxOfficeTheory had it pegged at $90M-$123M for a three-day domestic open. Deadline‘s pre-release projection sat in the $160M-and-up range for the five-day. The latter proved closer to reality, but the prediction range itself reveals the analyst-class anxiety: nobody inside the industry was confident the sequel would replicate the original. The reason was structural. The 2023 film was the first Mario movie in 30 years following the 1993 live-action disaster — a property that an entire generation of millennials and Gen X parents had been quietly waiting to see done correctly. It was also the first video game movie to clear a billion, the highest-grossing animated opening in history at the time, and the cultural turn that broke Hollywood’s decades-long failure rate on game adaptations. None of that is available to a sequel.
Add to that a 2026 animated marketplace that’s already been worked over by Pixar’s Hoppers — which had been chugging along since its March debut on its way to a $354 million global total — and Sony’s GOAT (which cleared $100 million domestically). Amazon MGM’s Project Hail Mary has held strong as adult counterprogramming. The family audience that flooded into theaters in 2023 has had a lot more to do in 2026. Galaxy is fighting for a slice of a pie that’s been pre-sliced.
The Illumination math still works
For all of the above, none of this reads as a crisis inside Universal. A $110 million animated sequel projected to finish between $1 billion and $1.1 billion globally is comfortably profitable, has already pushed the broader Mario film franchise past $2 billion across two films, and makes the property the 10th highest-grossing animated film franchise of all time off two titles — the third franchise in Chris Meledandri‘s portfolio to land in that top ten, alongside Despicable Me/Minions and Ice Age. Meledandri is not making a movie that does $1.36 billion every time. He’s making movies that print money. Galaxy prints money.
The structural question is what the studio learns. There is reporting that a third Mario film is in early development alongside Nintendo’s broader theatrical expansion — a Legend of Zelda live-action film from director Wes Ball is set for 2027, a Donkey Kong project has been filed at the copyright office under an untitled banner, and Miyamoto has publicly tamped down speculation about a Nintendo cinematic universe. The Mario sequel will go again. The question is whether the next one will hold the line that Galaxy couldn’t, or whether the franchise has revealed a ceiling.
The kicker
The most useful frame for The Super Mario Galaxy Movie isn’t comparison to its predecessor — it’s comparison to almost anything else. This is the highest-grossing movie of 2026 so far, by a lot. It’s the year’s biggest opener. It’s the only Hollywood title to clear $900 million globally in the calendar year. It’s the kind of result that any studio in the post-pandemic theatrical market would trade three of their summer tentpoles to engineer.
It’s just not a Mario movie. And in a market where the comp is the 2023 film — a film that cleared a billion before its fifth weekend, that ended up the third-highest-grossing animated film of all time, that helped rescue a flagging post-COVID theatrical business — not a Mario movie is the story.
Universal will take the cash. Miyamoto will go back to his post-mortem. Illumination will figure out what to do with Mario, Luigi and a now-canon Fox McCloud the next time out. And the industry will quietly mark down its expectations for the third one — which is, in its own way, the most telling line on the spreadsheet.
