Mario owns the two biggest video game movies ever. Here are all 10 top earners

Video game movies keep earning back their budgets at the box office, and more adaptations arrive every year. Only two have ever passed $1 billion, and both of them star Mario.

Zero1, a live-streaming platform, ranked the 10 top-earning adaptations by ticket sales through September 2026 using Box Office Mojo and The Numbers, then compared each film's gross with its budget and international share to show which ones earned the most.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie grossed $1.36 billion worldwide against a $100 million budget, a return of 13.6 times that Zero1 found is higher than any other video game adaptation on the list. The next best return, 9.2 times, belongs to its own sequel.

The U.S. and Canada alone paid $575 million to see it, which is more than Sonic the Hedgehog 3 earned everywhere in the world. International audiences supplied the other 57.7% of the total.

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie takes second place with $1.01 billion, which makes Mario the only franchise with two films past the $1 billion mark. The sequel opened in April and had already reached that total by the end of September.

It did so on a $110 million budget, so it earned about nine times what it cost to make, and 57.5% of its gross came from outside the U.S. and Canada. Together the two Mario films have grossed roughly $2.37 billion, about two and a half times the total for A Minecraft Movie.

A Minecraft Movie ranks third with $960 million, which is 6.4 times its $150 million budget and one of the best returns of any franchise on the list. It also had the biggest opening of any video game film, taking in $163 million in its first weekend in the U.S. and Canada.

That fast start meant the film held up less over time, with its U.S. total ending at around 2.6 times the opening weekend. International audiences supplied 55.8% of the global gross.

Sonic the Hedgehog 3 comes fourth with $492 million, about four times its $122 million budget, and just over half of that money, 52%, came from abroad.

Reviews set it apart from the rest of the top 10. Zero1 found that 86% of critics liked it, the best score among the high-grossing video game films, and verified audiences gave it 95%. That helped it at the U.S. box office, where the film earned nearly four times its $60 million opening weekend.

Pokémon Detective Pikachu rounds out the top five with $451 million, and released in 2019, it is the oldest film in the top five. Its fans were mostly overseas, with about seven in 10 dollars, or 68.1%, coming from outside the U.S. and Canada, which left the domestic total at $144 million.

Critics were more positive than for most of the other big hits, giving it 68%, and ticket sales came to three times its $150 million budget.

Warcraft is the clearest example on the list of a film that depended on audiences abroad. Zero1's data shows about $440 million in worldwide ticket sales, and 89.2% of it came from outside the U.S. and Canada, the highest international share of any film here.

That means the U.S. and Canada contributed only about 10.8% of the total. The return was also the lowest of the 10, at 2.7 times its budget, so Warcraft's total reflects its global reach more than its efficiency.

Rampage grossed about $430 million worldwide, 3.6 times its budget, and 76.4% of that came from outside the U.S. and Canada, the second-highest international share on the list behind Warcraft.

Only about 23.6% of its ticket sales came from the domestic market. That split looks much closer to Warcraft's than to the Mario films, which drew roughly 42% of their gross from the U.S. and Canada.

Uncharted grossed about $410 million, 3.4 times its budget, with 63.5% of the total coming from outside the U.S. and Canada.

The film sits in the middle of the list on both measures. Its international share is higher than the Mario, Sonic and Minecraft films but well below Warcraft and Rampage, and its return falls between Pokémon Detective Pikachu at three times and Rampage at 3.6 times.

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 grossed about $410 million and returned 4.5 times its budget, with 52.9% of ticket sales coming from outside the U.S. and Canada.

Its return is the fifth best on the list, behind only the two Mario films, A Minecraft Movie and The Angry Birds Movie. It also shows how the franchise built on itself, since Sonic the Hedgehog 3 earned more than $490 million in the next installment.