History of Hollywood and Game Adaptations

Pre-Production of Super Mario Bros.

Production Issues on Super Mario Bros.

Critical and Fan Reaction

Cultural Legacy

Why we Love This Movie

-INTRODUCTION-

Everyone knows about Super Mario Bros., don't they? At one point in time, kids were more familiar with Mario than Mickey Mouse. So, when something’s really popular, you make a movie about it, right? Well, that’s exactly what happened. Super Mario Bros. was released on May 28, 1993 by Hollywood Pictures (now Walt Disney Pictures). It starred Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo as the titular Mario and Luigi—the Mario Brothers. Hollywood's original "bad boy" Dennis Hopper starred as the sinister King Koopa, and Samantha Mathis portrayed Princess Daisy.

The film attempted to provide a legitimate backstory for the Mario Brothers' first adventure, becoming the "Super" Mario Bros. by the film's end. The filmmakers researched what little they had available to them at the time—the major Mario games released by filming in 1992 were Super Mario Bros. 1, 2, 3, and Super Mario World. Although a "fantasy based" film--inspired more literally by the games--had made its way through pre-production, the producers lost faith in that approach and instead turned to Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel (the creators of Max Headroom) to direct, allowing them to develop their own take on the Super Mario Bros. from the ground up.

For some, the end result was an interesting, unusual, entertaining, compelling, and inspired look into this fantastical world. Others have had a hard time accepting the way the 8 and 16-bit games were adapted onto celluloid, calling the movie a complete disaster and disgrace to the video games. The goal of this website is to help its visitors better understand an often misunderstood film. What the filmmakers were trying to do with this movie had never been done before, so we think it's important to appreciate the immense amount of thought and respect that went into creating the final product. In the end, the filmmakers did something wildly revolutionary—by making the first ever theatrical feature based on a video game property.

-Ryan Hoss, Webmaster

-HISTORY OF HOLLYWOOD AND GAME ADAPTIONS -

Video Games and Hollywood are two industries that have a shaky history together, and yet as video games become more popular, they are more likely to meet on a regular basis. Recent developments have seen Hollywood Studios hired to make emotive trailers for upcoming action games. In the case of the game 'Dead Island' the quality of the trailer showed up the lack of quality in the game's own writing, with Halo 3 employing the same technique to more positive rapture. However Hollywood grabbing onto hot video game properties (Or creating some of their own) goes back as far as the late 1970s.

Super Mario Bros is not the first movie based on video gaming, but it is the first based on a specific popular brand. Prior to Super Mario Bros, the video game movies were in the guise of original science fiction ideas. Tron (1982) was one of the first and most prominent movies to utilise video gaming as a major plot arc. It used (at the time) top of the range CGI special effects and was Disney's first foray into video game adaptions, and while not based on an existing video game, several game adaptions were made on multiple consoles.



WarGames (1983) was the next popular movie to try and translate video games over, this time a young boy plays a very basic early 1980's style video game which just so happens to be, unknown to the boy, controlling actual warheads and building a possible war between Russia and America. The Last Starfighter (1984) was one of the last popular films on video gaming during the 1980s and achieved only light success compared to the movies before it, partly due to the video game crash of 1983 having fully taken effect (which wouldn't recover until Nintendo revitalised the market in 1985/86). It did, however, have the privilege of being the first movie to do space-based special effects using only CGI which required them to make new graphical programs in order to accomplish a cinematic look, and almost had a real "Last Starfighter" video game made for it by Atari - however this video game was eventually cancelled.



When it came to the next time video games were to be converted by Hollywood for a major production, it made sense to utilise Disney as they had kick-started the trend back in 1982 and Super Mario Bros for reviving the dying video game media format almost single-handedly. Anytime anyone should ask "Why did they think a movie based on Super Mario was a good idea?", then the reasons seemed obvious at the time. It was a franchise which had saved video gaming, by a studio which had revolutionised CGI in film-making and with the right production team behind it - How could it possibly go wrong?

-PRE-PRODUCTION OF SUPER MARIO BROS. -



While we have an entire section of Pre-Production information for you to peruse in detail, I just want to lightly hit on several things that shaped the production of the movie in terms of its style and direction. First of all, it began with a script idea that was much more faithful to the original video games. Cartoonish in nature, it was a mixture of then-director Greg Beeman leaving the project and Shigeru Miyamoto (The creator of Super Mario, Legend of Zelda, Pikmin and many others) preferring the movie create its own world that pushed the project to find a new way of translating to the big screen. For whatever reason the direct cartoonish script was not attracting directors to the project, and so a more interesting concept had to be made.



The script would go through many various iterations. Firstly the Dinohattan concept was grafted onto the fantasy storyline to give the script a more realistic edge, but keeping the more fantastical elements of the story (Such as Mario and Luigi being characters in prophecy). It was then rewritten again into a more sci-fi edge, but this time with lots more added comedy inspired by the success of Ghostbusters. This script was also filled with more, and story-related, references to the games which the final film only really included as background detail. It then moved on to a new writer, who took inspiration from Die Hard (Including a cameo of Bruce Willis in a Koopa Tower air duct), moving away from comedy, bar some satire, and delving into a darker adult-oriented adventure.



The script was rewritten many times, however the script put forward in March 1992 was the one that got everyone's attention. It was a Mad Max style plot, with a script far more refined, sophisticated and adult-oriented than any of the previous scripts had dared to be. While not so related to the games (Which is what Shigeru Miyamoto wanted) it did encorporate a more refined British political satire and showed the reptilian population as more hedonistic. This was a very self-aware script with political and social depth and brought Dennis Hopper, Bob Hoskins and Fiona Shaw to the project. For those wondering "How did they get such big names in this movie?", that is where they came on board. A Disney production of a revolutionary game translation with deep political and social undertones. It was a shame that the majority of these elements would go through so many changes during production and get left out - a fact which angered many of the primary cast.

-PRODUCTION ISSUES ON SUPER MARIO BROS. -

With a strong script, strong cast and strong company heritage in the field of CGI and video games based movie making, Super Mario Bros. was a surefire winner. All it required was a crack team of production crew and success was in the bag. This was assured by several legendary artists in the movie making industry with more-than impressive resumes. First off was production designer David L. Snyder - known for his work as art director for Ridley Scott's now-legendary film, Blade Runner.

Snyder seemed to be the one of the only people in the end who focussed heavily on game references, building the entire city of Dinohattan inside a disused cement factory complete with Hammer Bros Tattoos, the Boom Boom Bar, Wiggler beer etc. In fact his city designs ensured a striking sci-fi look that matched the dark and adult-themed stylings of the original script. There was also Alan Silvestri composing the music, most famous for his soundtrack to the epic Back To The Future trilogy, giving the film a massive boost in professional quality. If it was thought that Super Mario Bros would be a surefire flop, you wouldn't get artists of this calibre working on the movie.

Despite the seemingly perfect blend of professional artists, Super Mario Bros was marred by huge problems during the production phase. Firstly all of the cast have unanimously stated that the directing duo (Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel) were horrendous to work for, with Dennis Hopper stating they were "...control freaks and wouldn't talk before they made decisions.", and Bob Hoskins being much more aggressive and stating that the director's "...arrogance had been mistaken for talent.". Indeed, after only a few weeks they were removed from the set and the production and direction was handed over to somebody else. This was due to the director's wanting to make a darker, hard edged movie and Disney wanting to develop a more family-friendly film - with daily script rewrites making the movie fall short of them both instead. Under these conditions, the seemingly "perfect" translation with all of it's highly acclaimed and celebrated parts, started to crumble.

The movie required an extensive amount of ADR (Audio dubbing usually used to correct/rephrase parts, due to mis-spoken or hard-to-hear audio issues) just to patch holes in the new and completely mish-mashed storyline. There were a lot of cuts, usually to filmed sequences deemed too 'dark' for a family friendly movie. These are all intriguing aspects to this movie that we would like to see more of (And there are more in-depth details as we find them in our Pre-Production and Post-Production sections on this site). There was the complete devolution (To "death" as green slime) of a Koopa employee after Toad's transformation, the filmed sequence of Koopa chasing Daisy's mother through Brooklyn (Which we only have a short clip of from a trailer), the Scapelli goons who were filmed but never seen in the end movie and most importantly there was a deeper emotional through-line to the entire movie of Luigi doubting his 'family pride' and Mario resenting his brother for getting him into Dinohattan in the first place. Such sequences are missing, and would likely add a bit of weight to the film which harsh cutting left out.

-CRITICAL AND FAN REACTION -

Upon its release, film recieved a whirlwind of positive reviews from many countries around the world. In America, The Washington Post, Sixty Second Preview and Los Angeles Times all raved about the movie. In the UK the Daily Mirror and Daily Mail (Newspapers) both gave highly praising reviews (The Daily Mail calling it "Hilarious & Exciting - A cross between Indiana Jones, Blade Runner & Star Wars"). The Swedish Njutafilms release also includes the Expressen's review, loosely translated it says "Superb! This grand adventure bounces unabashedly forward without rhyme or reason."



Despite the film's current status, these are not negative reviews. However it only made less than half its budget back, and this was likely due to being released at the same time as Jurassic Park which had similar dinosaur themes but a bigger name behind it. At the time, nobody could compete with Steven Spielberg. The failure of this movie was less likely to be related to the movie quality than a simple case of bad release date. Fans and movie-goers had no reason to think anything negative of the movie, the reviews were mostly positive, but a choice between dinosaurs in Super Mario Bros or dinosaurs in Jurassic Park by Steven Spielberg? The money spoke, and a false fact about the Super Mario Bros' failure being down to the film's quality was set into folklore.

Fan reaction was quite different, however. Despite many of the fans not having gone to see the movie on it's release, the few that did were expecting a rather faithful adaption of the source material. What they wound up with was a mish-mashed sci-fi/comedy adventure which was somewhat confused about it wanted to be. For this reason, fans panned the movie outright without actually looking into the movie itself. Given a short, once-over look (Much like thumbing through the pictures in a book without caring too much for text) the Super Mario fans felt that this was a betrayal of what they had paid good hard-earned cash to see. How often the question is raised "Why didn't they make it more like the games?", and the reply has already been mentioned here. No director would sign up, and Shigeru Miyamoto who makes the games said he wanted it to be it's own unique entity - he even commented on the film's commercial failure:

This really becomes a hard film to judge (if you've not yet seen it) because it's pretty flawless, in a technical sense. It had a superb cast, superb crew, an excellent concept and some of the best studio resources available to anybody at the time. However due to errors and mistakes made during production, regardless of who was to blame, forced the film into a soup of confusion. Is it this that makes Mario fans so angry? Possibly. But I think moreover they simply didn't like the idea of seeing their favourite games character ported into a different reality. This is a shame, because Super Mario Bros is not like other video game adaptions of it's era.



In the few years after the release of this movie came Street Fighter and Double Dragon. These films were made to be cheesy, designed with minimal effort and a generic crew and relatively poor casts to be a cheap and easy cash-in on a rising video game franchise. Super Mario Bros was not a quick and easy cash-in, it wasn't written on the back of a napkin and developed by a studio just after a fast buck. Disney had a lot to prove, having Tron as it's own pregenitor, and the effort to convert Super Mario with faithful nods to the games but respecting Shigeru Miyamoto's wish that it would be it's own unique entity really shows just how much attention this movie was given.



Even if deemed to be a failure by future generations (And this site's hope is for more gamers to become more aware of the film's positives to tackle this), hopefully the unfair and misplaced belief that this is the worst video game adaption, and that this was a cheap and thoughtless movie, can be debunked and replaced with an attitude that "Yeah, maybe it didn't work, but at least they gave it a good try worthy of note.".

-CULTURAL LEGACY -

Regardless of your perspective on the movie, the fact is it has become a huge cult movie. Many sci-fi movies do this, Alien and Blade Runner are two key examples of movies that were panned and avoided at release before being "rediscovered" on video to become huge success stories. Super Mario Bros is unlikely to hit the dizzy heights of those two cult movies, but then it does also have more obstacles to overcome. Trying to recover from a fanbase who pan the movie without actually seeing it, as well as becoming a key reference in video game and movie media websites as a core example of how not to make video game adaptions. Most of these people, including the industry journalists, haven't actually sat down and watched the movie, they simply reference it because it's the "cool" thing to do. The media who saw it on release had many positives to say on the movie, and the film's own fans certainly have much praise, despite acknowledging it's drawbacks.