Have you had a chance to see The Super Mario Bros. Movie in theaters? That’s OK, as it will surely be streaming in a couple of months. But if you can’t wait that long, it actually leaked on Twitter this past week, thus making The Super Mario Bros. Movie available for no cost whatsoever to the social media platform’s 200+ million active users..
In one example, the movie was uploaded on Sunday in two parts by the Twitter account vids that go hard, which took a moment from its usual content of apparently random videos that can be found pretty much anywhere on the internet so they could offer The Super Mario Bros. Movie for free. The post, which was deleted after being available for several hours, was captioned with, “F*ck it, the whole super Mario bros movies”, along with a popcorn emoji. The account may have more than 1 million followers, but Forbes reports that over 9 million users accessed the Illumination movie. If we’re talking monetary loss here, with an average movie ticket about $11 or so, that’s around $99 million of missed in box office revenue.
Even with the Twitter leak, The Super Mario Bros Movie went on to have another monumental weekend, taking in $40 million domestically (matching our own prediction) and officially crossing $1 billion worldwide. This makes it the highest-grossing movie about Italian plumber brothers in box office history.
How could a Twitter account put up an entire movie? With a Twitter Blue account, those that pony up the $8/month or $84/year can upload videos that run up to one hour long, which is why this account had to do it in two parts. Imagine if they try to upload Killers of the Flower Moon! Expectedly, it wasn’t just one Twitter account that uploaded the entirety of The Super Mario Bros. Movie online, with others even getting around the same number of views. We wonder how many of these are Stephen King…
What, if any, repercussions do you feel the Twitter account that uploaded The Super Mario Bros. Movie should face? Will the handling of it set a precedent? Give us your take in the comments section below!