Box Office (Sunday Update): A Minecraft Movie Dethrones Super Mario Bros. Movie With Highest-Grossing Debut For Video Game Adaptation

UPDATE: 2025/04/06 07:59 EST BY BRENNAN KLEIN

A Minecraft Movie Shoots Past Initial $135M Projections To Break Video Game Adaptation Debut Record

This article was originally written Saturday AM and has been updated Sunday AM with up-to-date box office projections (in bold), a full chart, and further analysis.

A Minecraft Movie is demolishing the competition. The new release, which is based on the popular video game of the same name and was directed by Jared Hess (Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre), stars Jason Momoa, Danielle Brooks, Emma Myers, and Sebastian Hanse as a mismatched group of people who get trapped in a land called Overworld, where they are guided by the bizarre crafter Steve (Jack Black). The Minecraft Movie release kicks off the April movie schedule after having broken a record for the most ticket pre-sales for a PG-rated movie in 2025 so far.

Per Variety, as of Sunday morning, A Minecraft Movie is projected to debut with a 3-day total of $157 million at the domestic box office. This sees it take No. 1 on the domestic chart for the weekend and marks both the highest-grossing debut of the year so far and the first to gross more than $100 million, as the second-place title is Captain America: Brave New World, which debuted in February with an $88.8 million haul.

It also surpasses 2023's The Super Mario Bros. Movie to earn the best opening weekend for a video game adaptation ever. Super Mario previously opened to $146.4 million and quickly rose to a record-shattering $1.361 billion, making it the highest-grossing video game movie of all time worldwide. Below, see the full domestic Top 5 chart for the weekend:

#	Title	3-Day Total	Cumulative (Domestic)
1	A Minecraft Movie	$157 million	$157 million (weekend 1)
2	A Working Man	$7.2 million	$27.7 million (weekend 2)
3	The Chosen: Last Supper - Part 2	$6.7 million	$6.7 million (weekend 1)
4	Snow White	$6 million	$77 million (weekend 3)
5	The Woman in the Yard	$4.5 million	$17 million (weekend 2)

The only other new release that has debuted in the Top 5 is The Chosen: Last Supper - Part 2, a Fathom Events presentation which brings a new collection of episodes of the faith-based television series to the big screen. Last weekend, Last Supper - Part 1 debuted with a 3-day total of $11.5 million, which made it the highest-grossing installment of the franchise to date.

There has been plenty of movement elsewhere on the chart, with the Jason Statham action movie A Working Man and the Blumhouse horror title The Woman in the Yard both falling one spot apiece in their sophomore weekends. Disney's live-action Snow White, in the meantime, has fallen straight from No. 2 to No. 4 with a roughly 58% drop in its third weekend, slowing down quickly enough that it may not even reach $100 million at the domestic marketplace by the end of its run.

With two new releases taking up space in the Top 5, two holdover titles have dropped off the chart entirely. One is The Last Supper - Part 1, which dropped from No. 3 to No. 7 with a $2 million haul seeing it drop 84%, which is hardly a surprise considering its follow-up is already playing in theaters. Meanwhile, A24's Death of a Unicorn has dropped from No. 5 to No. 6 with $2.4 million at a 58% drop, which is not an uncommon week-on-week fall for a horror title.

What This Means For A Minecraft Movie

It Is On Track To Become A Hit

This box office surge for the movie has been belied by the fact that audiences have given it a significant boost on Rotten Tomatoes. Although critics' A Minecraft Movie reviews have given the movie a Rotten score of 48%, at the time of writing, its Popcornmeter score is 87%, as aggregated from more than 1,000 verified user ratings. This means that it is just 3% away from being Verified Hot, which is a threshold it could very well reach as more reviews are added throughout its theatrical run. This goes a long way in making up for the movie's budget.

It could very well earn more than $1 billion...

The reported budget for A Minecraft Movie is a whopping $150 million. While movies typically need to earn back two and a half times their budgets in theaters, most likely placing the video game movie's break-even point somewhere around $375 million or more, the fact that it has already earned back its price tag in the domestic marketplace alone is a very good sign that it will turn a profit. In fact, if it continues following the trajectory of Super Mario Bros., it could very well earn more than $1 billion by the end of its theatrical run.

Our Take On The Weekend Box Office

The Year Is Slowly Recovering

Even though 2025 started off strong with a number of mid-level hits, late February and March saw the market enter a period of major doldrums. However, A Minecraft Movie has finally shaken the box office awake by giving theaters their first $100 million weekend of the year. While the rest of the month looks relatively quiet, Marvel will kick off May with the upcoming Thunderbolts*, which could provide another boost as the summer finally heats up by delivering multiple potential $100 million openers such as Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning, Lilo & Stitch, and How to Train Your Dragon.

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Source: Variety