Shigeru Miyamoto — a creator of the Super Mario Bros. franchise – has said he is grateful for the bad press that the recent Super Mario Bros. Movie has received, for “contributing to the movie’s notoriety and buzz.”

The Super Mario Bros. Movie hit the ground running with its release earlier this month, and had the biggest opening weekend ever for an animated film at the box office. Discussing the sucess in a new interview, Miyamoto admitted that the film exceeded all expectations he had, and received a response globally that could only be achieved through “luck”.

“I did have a level of expectations that this movie would also do well [like the Super Nintendo World theme park], but I was very surprised that it went beyond what I could have imagined when it finally came out,” Miyamoto said to the Japanese Press (via Rebit).

“You need some luck to achieve this level of success for a film,” he added.

Surprisingly, the creator also shared his gratitude for the many less favourable reviews from critics too, as he believes they contributed to the publicity raised for the film: “While many foreign critics have given the movie relatively low ratings, I think that also contributed to the movie’s notoriety and buzz.”

As well as explaining that there was a slightly different approach to the Japanese version of the film than the American version, Miyamoto continued to share his hopes that the film – which stars Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Pratt and Jack Black – will pave the way for more Nintendo-based films.

This comes after Elon Musk recently spoke out against critics of the movie, claiming that they were “disconnected from reality”.

Reviews have generally been negative, and the film currently holds “Rotten” critics’ score of 59 per cent on review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes. However, the audience score – which is voted for by non professional critics – currently sits at 96 per cent positive, making it “Fresh”.

In a two-star review, NME described the film as being “hobbled by a perfunctory plot” and falling victim to “some lazy creative choices”.

“Clearly, adapting the best-selling video game franchise of all-time into an equally ingenious movie is a tall order,” it read. “The one previous attempt, a 1993 live-action film starring Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo, was a box office flop that has since built a bit of a cult following. This one seems destined for the opposite fate: it’s faithful enough to tempt existing fans to the cinema, but too perfunctory to be pored over.”

In other news, last week (April 20), Jack Black‘s ballad ‘Peaches’ from The Super Mario Bros. Movie entered the Billboard Hot 100.

The track, which is sung to Princess Peach, debuted at Number 83 on the chart with 5.8million US streams and 6,000 downloads in its first week. The music video for the song has also clocked up over 18million views.