Hello and welcome to The Game Business Micro.
This is our mini-edition of The Game Business for paying subscribers, where we look at some of the biggest stories of the previous week, and give our own take on what is happening.
It has been Spring Break, and that means it was a slightly quieter week when it comes to big stories. In fact, the biggest video game story wasn’t about a video game at all, but rather the blockbuster success of The Super Mario Galaxy movie.
But there were a few other developments, including job losses at Eidos Montreal and Coffee Stain, an acquisition of a new Japanese game developer, Nintendo third-party data and Xbox is going on tour.
Let’s take a look.
Fans defy the critics (again) with blockbuster Super Mario Galaxy movie
In Brief: The Super Mario Galaxy movie delivered a massive opening weekend with $372.5 million gross over five days. The film made $190 million in the US and a further $182.4 million internationally (the Japan release is still to come). It is slightly below the first Mario movie, which managed $375 million over five days, but it is comfortably the biggest movie launch of 2026. The strong result comes despite a negative critical reaction.
What You Need To Know:
The film had a budget of $110 million.
Mario is the only animated movie series with two films that have exceeded more than $350 million during its opening weekend.
It is already the No.9 highest-grossing video game movie ever after just five days. The biggest is the first Super Mario Bros movie, which finished on $1.36 billion.
At the time of writing, the film has a 42 Critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but a 89% rating from fans. The first film finished on a 59 Critics rating and a 95% fan rating.
It was a similar story with last year’s A Minecraft Movie. It had a critics rating of 47, a fan rating of 84, and generated $955 million at the Box Office.
My Take:
I’ve taken my boys to see the Super Mario Galaxy movie twice now. It’s not going to win any awards, but I thought it was fine.
I found it surprisingly faithful to the Mario experience. The Mario games are a series of bonkers, unpredictable, inventive moments connected together by a largely irrelevant plot with minimal character development. The Mario movie is… exactly the same. There is a story, and there are character moments (if you squint), but the film makers clearly prioritized dinosaur chases over emotional arcs. In other words, it’s a Nintendo product.
But critics, on the whole, didn’t like it. And so once again criticism has come under the spotlight. The fans had the opposite reaction to the film. And we’ve seen a similar development around the game Crimson Desert, which received slightly lower reviews from critics (although it still reviewed quite well), but a far more glowing reception from players. The argument online is that the critics have got it wrong.
