The Super Mario Galaxy Movie & Project Hail Mary Rocket Easter Weekend Past Huge Box Office Record

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Both The Super Mario Bros. Movie and Project Hail Mary have been huge hits, dramatically boosting ticket sales at theaters across the country.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie launched on Wednesday, giving it a strong start heading into the Easter weekend. It arrived in theaters while another space-themed hit, the sci-fi film Project Hail Mary, was already dominating the box office. Based on the novel by The Martian‘s Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary is now Amazon MGM Studios’ most successful film ever, earning over $300 million globally and staying at number one in North American theaters for two weekends – a total of 12 days.

According to Deadline, The Super Mario Bros. Movie is expected to earn $129.4 million domestically over the traditional three-day weekend, reaching a total of $188.5 million over its first five days in theaters. While performing well, this is slightly lower than the opening weekend of the first Super Mario Bros. Movie, which earned $146.4 million over three days and $204.6 million over five days during the Easter holiday in 2023.

Although it’s behind the original Super Mario Bros. movie, the new Super Mario Galaxy Movie is breaking records this weekend. It topped the domestic box office over Easter and achieved the second-highest opening weekend earnings for both Illumination and any animated Universal film (after Super Mario Bros.). It also marks the third-best opening for a movie based on a video game, following Super Mario Bros. and A Minecraft Movie, which earned $162.7 million in its first three days.

While the latest Galaxy movie might not reach the same heights as its predecessor, it’s still expected to be a huge success. The 2023 film was a massive hit, grossing $1.361 billion globally. If the new movie performs similarly, it’s likely to earn over ten times its $110 million production cost and become another billion-dollar film.

Although Project Hail Mary is likely to fall to number two in domestic box office charts behind The Super Mario Bros. Movie, it’s expected to earn $33.2 million over the weekend – a drop of only 39%, which is a very small decline.

The film experienced a decline in ticket sales during its third weekend in theaters. It had previously seen a 32.8% drop in sales during its second weekend, which was among the smallest drops for a sci-fi movie’s second weekend ever. This week’s decline could have been even bigger, but it was lessened by the fact that the movie lost access to its more expensive IMAX and large-format screens to the new release of Mario.

As a huge movie fan, I was thrilled to see that Project Hail Mary just crossed $219.7 million domestically! That makes it the first film of 2026 to reach the $200 million mark here in the US. While Super Mario Galaxy is looking like it’ll eventually take the lead, right now, the Ryan Gosling movie is still the highest-grossing film of the year. It actually took that spot from last year’s Avatar: Fire and Ash, which made $153.9 million since the beginning of 2026.

This weekend, “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” and “Project Hail Mary” are expected to bring in a combined $162.6 million. This makes it the biggest Easter weekend ever for movie theaters in the US, surpassing the previous record of $138 million earned by the top ten movies the weekend of March 20th, when “Project Hail Mary” first came out.

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2026-04-04 18:51