In the US, the great success of Super Mario Bros. – The film broke the Lion King record in a rather curious… yet significant category. Rotten Tomatoes has something to do with it… and it’s not too noble a victory.
Super Mario Bros. – The Movie also beat the remake del Re Leonein a record funny but also quite significant, which if possible further increases the distance between critics and audiences, at least in certain cases more related to a specific fandom. On the site Rotten Tomatoes, the Illumination / Nintendo cartoon is in fact, after the box office of the last weekend, the highest American gross to have an average of “marginal” reviews, ie negative, on the famous and forerunner aggregator site. Let’s look at the numbers.
Super Mario Bros. – The film is the highest-paying “bad” film at the US box office
We personally loved Super Mario Bros. – The Moviewhile imagining that much of his poetic meaning it would hardly have gone down well with everyone. After last weekend’s collections, with 549,090,920 dollars taken home in the US, the animated film Nintendo / Illumination beat the remake of the Re Leone of 2019 (543,638,043 North American gross) as the highest grosser with the worst critical average on Rotten Tomatoes. The site aggregator American is a historical source, a destination for consultation perhaps less known internationally than Metacriticbut a year older. Well, the average reviews of Super Mario Bros. – The film scores 59%, while another “rotten” like Jon Favreau’s The Lion King “boasted” 52%. We must always take this news with a grain of salt, reasoning: we certainly don’t want to belittle it here the importance of professional criticism (since our site hosts it, and with pride), however we must admit that in some cases, especially when the nostalgia o one ingrained sense of closeness to a brand, to atmospheres and characters, there is no more or less objective judgment that matters. After all, if it is possible to outline a strategy to frame a film critically, please explain the reasons why a work of art can be liked it is a less linear process. And Hollywood, while waiting, laughs cashing checks.
For the record, the Super Mario overtaking the Lion King applies only to North American territory: in the world Simba dominates with 1,663,075,400 dollars. In some rankings, it even beats Frozen II – The secret of Arendelle as the highest-grossing animated film in the history of cinema, even if the “cartoon” identity of the revisited Lion King is periodically (and rightly) debated.
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