Directors remember the catastrophic live-action Super Mario Bros. movie
By Ashley Hurst
Video game movies have always had something of a grim reputation; look no further than dire adaptations like Doom, Warcraft, and Assassin’s Creed. One adaptation, however, makes all the others look pretty serviceable in comparison, 1993’s Super Mario Bros.
The original Super Mario Bros. movie was slammed by critics at the time, with fans dinging the awful casting, dire special effects, clunky story, and bad dialogue. The movie introduces us Brooklyn-area plumbers Mario (Bob Hoskins) and Luigi (John Leguizamo), who discover a parallel world occupied by intelligent dinosaurs. The duo must battle King Koopa (Dennis Hopper) and his Goomba guards in order the save the trapped Princess Daisy.
The directors thought Super Mario Bros. could rival Batman
A few years before Super Mario Bros. hit theaters, Tim Burton had huge success with Batman, and then its sequel Batman Returns. Super Mario Bros. directors Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel felt they could ride the wave and create something good enough to rival the Batman movies.
“I remember saying to Annabel, ‘This is it. This is going to be our Batman,” Morton told Total Film in a recent interview. “It was very fantasy-oriented and childlike. I wanted to make a film that was mainly for kids, but also had qualities their parents could enjoy.”
Unfortunately, the film ended up being so bad that it dragged down video game movies as a whole for years. It also didn’t help that stone cold classic Jurassic Park was released the same month. In hindsight, there was no hope for it at all.
How the movie was supposed to tie in with the Mario mythos
The original Super Mario Bros movie proposed that dinosaurs didn’t go extinct but instead lived in another dimension, a bizarre attempt to make sense of the fact that Mario jumps on little turtles in the games. Again, Jurassic Park was released at the same time, so dinosaurs were big. “My son was obsessed with dinosaurs at the time, so the idea was that the dinosaurs didn’t really get wiped out, they just got shifted into another dimension and the plumbers get shifted there, too. That’s how the whole story is triggered,” Morton said.
The movie was supposed to serve as a backstory for Nintendo’s Super Mario video game series. “This was the true story of what really happened before the plumbers return to Brooklyn,” Morton explained. “Of course, by that point, they’re TV celebrities and a couple of Japanese executives from Nintendo want to turn their story into a game, but it gets lost in translation. That’s how we ended up with the Nintendo game.”
Three decades later, we’re now about to see the next Super Mario Bros. movie, and it looks like lessons have been learned. For one, the movie is animated. It’s much more faithful to the games and critics are already enjoying it. According to Deadline, the movie is poised for a big opening weekend with a projected $225M+ at the worldwide box office!
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