‘Super Mario Bros’: Is the 1993 Live Action Version One of the Worst Movies Ever?

‘Super Mario Bros: The Movie’ has broken records in its first weekend becoming the best premiere of an animated film in history, achieving 377 million dollars worldwide in 5 days. The times in which video game adaptations were synonymous with fiasco seem to be long gone and examples such as ‘Sonic’, ‘Uncharted’ or the television show ‘The Last of Us’ seem to indicate a change in trend. But there was a time when arcade icons like ‘Super Mario Bros’, ‘Mortal Kombat’ or ‘Street Fighter’ tried to make the leap to the big screen and got scalded.

30 years ago, Nintendo tried to conquer Hollywood by taking its hallmark, the Italian plumber Mario, to the mecca of cinema. And for this he invested in what at that time was the first major production based on a video gamewith big stars of the moment like bob hoskins (‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit?’) and Dennis Hopper (‘Blue Velvet’). But the problem, according to the version of the Japanese company, is that he did not get involved as he should in the project and he trusted the American producers too much.

The result was a dark, post-apocalyptic film with humanoid dinosaurs. A kind of mix between ‘Total Recall’ and ‘Mad Max’ with a villain inspired by Donald Trump himself. What did this have to do with the video game created by Shigeru Miyamoto?

The directors Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton, who disowned their own film for decadesThey also regret that the lack of understanding between Nintendo and the producers led to a chaotic shoot and a lack of creative control that ended up killing the product. “If he had had a relationship with Miyamoto and we would have included him in the film, if he had been a producer and understood what we were doing, he would not have let certain things happen,” Morton recently told Variety. “We would have been a team and it would have been a different movie.”

The production of ‘Super Mario Bros’ was one of those shoots in which everything that could go wrong goes wrong. Leguizamo (Luigi) admitted years later that he and Hoskins (Mario) were drunk most of the timethe story changed every two for three and the fights between the producers and the directors were the order of the day.

“Two weeks before the first day of principal photography, the script was completely rewritten,” says Morton. “The producers forbade me to talk to the scriptwriter, but I called him one night because we were building all these amazing sets and monsters and prosthetics, and I said, ‘You need to know what we’re doing so you can keep it in the script, because we already spent a lot of the budget on them. When the producers found out I made this call, they went absolutely nuts on me, they destroyed me.”

Dennis Hopper (the villain Koopa) also participated in this derision with some controversial statements to the Los Angeles Times when the film had not even been released: “The directors will not give interviews? That’s the smartest thing I’ve ever heard from them. That’s actually the only smart thing I’ve heard they’ve ever done.”. Years later, in 2008, the actor was still outraged by the directors’ work: “It was a husband-and-wife directing team who were control freaks and didn’t speak before making decisions.” Hoskins didn’t hold his tongue either, stating over time that ‘Super Mario Bros.’ it was the “biggest disappointment of his career”, calling the production a “nightmare” and the directors “those fucking idiots”..

But, Is the movie really that bad? Yes and no. That is to say, as an adaptation of ‘Super Mario Bros’ it doesn’t make any sense. But As a dystopian sci-fi/fantasy film from the late ’80s/early ’90s, it undeniably has its charm. and, like many other shattered films of its day like ‘Howard: The New Hero’, it is finding its audience even if it is three decades late.

“Our achievement,” Morton claims, “was to create something truly original, even though it was based on a video game. It was fun, it was science fiction, it was fantasy, it was a love story.. And I think it succeeded in all of those elements. And the performances of many of the actors were great. I am proud of the film and I support it”.

Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton attended a special screening of their film last month and saw it for the first time since it was released 30 years ago and, to some extent, reconciled with it. “30 years of bad feelings evaporated in one night“Jankel celebrates.