Yahoo Movies The Super Mario Bros. Movie: How the first film flopped but became a cult classic
Mario's first movie outing was mired in production woes
Mario returns to cinemas today for his first animated adventure in The Super Mario Bros. Movie. Chris Pratt will voice the coin-loving plumber, with Charlie Day as his brother Luigi.
Meanwhile, a host of big names round out a star-studded cast, including Anya Taylor-Joy as Princess Peach, Jack Black as big bad Bowser and Seth Rogen as pop culture’s only tie-wearing great ape, Donkey Kong.
Read more: Super Mario Bros. star Anya Taylor-Joy wants a Zelda crossover movie
The film looks set to become a surefire hit, inviting viewers into a colourful adventure that remains faithful to its video game source material.
However, it isn’t Mario’s first foray into cinema screens.
What happened to 1993’s Super Mario Bros: The Movie
Released in 1993, Super Mario Bros. was directed by British filmmaking duo Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel. The pair had found early success by co-creating 1980s digital showbiz character Max Headroom and were eagerly looking for the perfect script that would help them transition into becoming major Hollywood movie makers.
Meanwhile, Nintendo had been trying to get a movie adaptation of their popular Super Mario Bros. franchise off the ground for a number of years. After securing the character rights from the company, British filmmaker and producer Roland Joffé commissioned a script from Rain Man screenwriter Barry Morrow.
Leaning into the fractured sibling relationship of Mario and Luigi, Morrow’s early draft attracted early attention from potential stars due to its emotional core.
In fact, the film was said to be so similar in style and tone to Morrow’s previous work Rain Man that it quickly earned the nickname ‘Drain Man’ around Hollywood.
After stars like Dustin Hoffman and Danny DeVito passed on playing Mario, and filmmakers such as Harold Ramis decided not to helm a film adaptation, producers eventually managed to convince British actor Bob Hoskins to sign on to the project, paving its way to becoming a reality.
Read more: The Super Mario Bros. Movie: Meet the star-studded voice cast
Eventually, Morrow’s script landed on the desk of Morton and Jankel but the duo felt that its family-focused themes wouldn’t work with what they had in mind.
Instead, they saw Mario’s world as an opportunity to do something different; a blank page on which these technically-minded filmmakers with a background in animation could do something visually different.
Morton devised a new idea, one that was meta and arguably ahead of its time.
In his take on the story, the dinosaurs didn’t die when the meteor hit. Instead, they branched off into their own separate parallel universe where they continued to thrive, evolve and look enviously over our world.
When a lost meteor shard resurfaces, Dinohattan’s evil ruler, King Kooper (Dennis Hopper) spies a way to merge these two universes and bring his dino-humans to the forefront of humanity once more.
It’s here where Brooklyn plumbers Mario (Hoskins) and Luigi (John Leguizamo) come into the story. After they’re warped into Dinohattan, they must help Princess Daisy (Samantha Mathis) stop King Koopa in his tracks.
Was 1993’s Super Mario Bros: The Movie a flop?
1993’s Super Mario Bros. was a flop — but not because of any decision made by its directorial duo.
In an attempt to secure more money for the production, the film’s producers bagged extra financing from Disney at the eleventh hour — but it came with a catch. Primarily, the House of Mouse requested rewrites to Morton and Jankel’s script to help make the project more family-friendly and so Bill and Ted co-creator Ed Solomon was brought on board to do a quick redraft.
However, when Morton and Jankel received their new script mere hours before they were due to begin their first day of production, it was a completely different beast. This left the filmmakers in a tricky situation.
Read more: Video games hoping to be the next Last of Us on TV
They now had a script that was vastly different to the one their big-name cast had originally signed on to and Dinohattan sets that had been meticulously built but no longer featured within the story.
Perhaps more importantly, a key ending sequence was missing that would’ve helped place all of Morton and Jankel’s wild and visually different story into context. Essentially, the original adventure was intended to be the story that ultimately inspired the Super Mario Bros. video games we all know so well today.
After Mario and Luigi have saved Dinohattan and Manhattan, there was supposed to be a scene where a pair of Japanese executives approach them, eager to turn their story into a video game.
However, due to language issues, key elements of Mario and Luigi’s retelling of their adventure are lost in translation, accidentally inspiring the colourful video game series that became such a hit.
Read more: Movies that ran out of money while in production
Worried that they’d be blacklisted if they left the project so close to their start date, Morton and Jankel decided to power forward as best they could — but the shoot was tense.
To make matters worse, when production wrapped, their stars quickly began separating themselves from the project, frequently blaming Morton and Jankel for its many faults.
Is Super Mario Bros: The Movie a cult classic?
Despite confusing both critics and fans following its release, Morton and Jankel’s 1993 Super Mario Bros. movie has since received a later-in-life cult appreciation.
Many fans have become fascinated with the film’s bold visual style and the inventiveness of its story — and while some of its faults are impossible to ignore — it has gathered a strong fanbase.
Read more: Movies considered so bad they're good
There’s even a fansite dedicated to cataloguing any and all information related to the movie and its troubled production and celebrating the lofty goals its filmmakers were trying to achieve.
The Super Mario Bros. Movie is out in UK cinemas now. Watch a trailer below.
