In a nutshell: The Super Mario Bros. Movie hit theaters on April 5 and has been crushing it at the box office ever since. The animated flick crossed the $1 billion milestone globally over the weekend en route to becoming the highest grossing film so far in 2023. The figures might have be even higher if it were not for social media.
Nintendo's new Super Mario Bros. movie picked up more than nine million additional views this weekend, but they did not come from ticket-wielding moviegoers at local cinemas.
As highlighted by The Verge, several Twitter accounts have been posting the full movie on the microblogging platform. According to the publication, one copy of the film posted on April 28th had already amassed 9.3 million views as of Sunday morning. Notably, both accounts referenced in the story from The Verge are marked as suspended as of this writing.
The Super Mario Bros. Movie has also become the highest grossing film based on a video game and highest grossing opening weekend for an animated movie.
The issue is at least partially the result of recent changes on Twitter's part – specifically, the newfound ability for Twitter Blue subscribers to upload videos up to 60 minutes long. String two or three of these together and boom, you have got a full length film ready to blast out to the masses.
How the user(s) acquired the movie is not really important here and truth be told, new releases are probably easier to source nowadays than they were back in the camcorder / earlier days of the Internet.
Twitter is just the latest outlet for pirated movies. Twitter sharing is topping headlines because it is a mainstream platform, but I have also heard that movies and livestreaming PPV events are readily available on other platforms like TikTok. Furthermore, traditional sharing outlets that aren't as mainstream are still thriving so long as you know where to look for them and how to use them.
Image credit: Lynda Sanchez