The Super Mario Bros. movie is a pretty big problem. So big, in fact, that it made more than $500 million worldwide within just nine days of its theatrical debut. Mamma mia, that’s a lot of money! As if that weren’t enough, the movie’s original song “Peaches,” written and performed by Bowser voice actor Jack Black, debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 chart this week at No. 83, marking Black’s first-ever solo single to date. deserved.
According to Billboard, “Peaches” was released on April 7 and amassed 5.8 million streams in the US and 6,000 downloads in its first week. The single’s release was accompanied by a hilarious live-action music video featuring Black, dressed in a Bowser-esque green suit and red headdress, sitting at a peach-colored piano and singing the lyrics with his signature flair for physical theatrics.
Image: Nintendo, lighting/Universal Pictures
Jack Black is a bona fide multi-hyphenate: an actor-comedian-musician whose bubbly charm and gregarious on-screen persona have earned him success throughout the movie (Rock School, Kung Fu Panda), television (Drunk history, The Mandalorian), Computer Games (Brutal legend, Psychonauts 2), and music, the latter most notably through his career as one half of the musical comedy rock duo Tenacious D which he formed in 1994 with bandmate Kyle Gass. Then the importance of The Super Mario Bros. movieBlack’s career success, both serving as the vehicle for what is arguably his biggest mainstream movie role to date as Mario’s fire-breathing (and heartthrobbing) nemesis Bower, while giving him the first solo hit of his nearly three-decade-long career as a musician, cannot be overemphasized.
Given the commercial success of the film, a sequel to The Super Mario Bros. movie feels like anything but a foregone conclusion at this point, despite neither Illumination (which is co-owned by Universal Pictures) nor Nintendo (which owns the rights to the Mario video game franchise) have announced a sequel at this point. While the question of the near future of the Mario Bros. film franchise hangs in the air like a floating question block, there is no question what Jack Black’s contribution to the film’s success is. Hopefully, this relationship of mutual benefit will play out when Black returns to the big screen as the big, bad Koopa King in the not-too-distant future.