The Koopa King sang his way up the charts
The Super Mario Bros. movie is a pretty big deal. So big that it grossed 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 film’s original song “Peaches,” written and performed by Bowser voice actor Jack Black, debuted this week at number 83 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, earning Black his first solo single to date.
According to Billboard, “Peaches” was released on April 7th and racked up 5.8 million streams in the US and 6,000 downloads within its first week. Accompanying the single’s release was a hilarious live-action music video, in which Black, dressed in a Bowser-esque green suit and red hat, sits at a peach-colored piano and sings the lyrics with his trademark flair for physical theatrics.
Image: Nintendo, Illumination/Universal Pictures
Jack Black is a true multi-hyphenate: an actor, comedian, and musician whose bubbly charm and gregarious screen personality has inspired him in films (School of Rock, Kung Fu Panda), television (Drunk History, The Mandalorian), video games (Brutal Legend, Psychonauts 2) and music, the latter primarily through his career as one half of the musical-comedy-rock duo Tenacious D, which he formed with bandmate Kyle Gass in 1994. The importance of The Super Mario Bros. Movie’s success to Black’s career, both of which serve as vehicles for what is arguably his biggest mainstream big screen role to date as Mario’s fire-breathing (and heart-stealing) nemesis Bower, while soloing him the first and only hit of his nearly three Decades of career as a musician cannot be overstated.
Given the film’s commercial success, a sequel to The Super Mario Bros. Movie feels like a foregone conclusion at this point, although neither Illumination (which is owned by Universal Pictures) nor Nintendo (which owns the rights to the Mario video). game franchise) announced a sequel at the time. While the question of the immediate future of the Mario Bros. film series hangs in the air like a floating block of questions, Jack Black’s contribution to the film’s success is not in question. Hopefully this mutually beneficial relationship will see Black return to the big screen as the big bad Koopa King in the not too distant future.
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