Super Mario Bros Movie 1993 – It’s all in the games… John Leguizamo and Bob Hoskins in Super Mario Bros: The Movie. Photo: Allstar/Cinetext/Allied Filmmakers
In 1993, the makers of The Killing Fields and Chariots of Fire bought the film rights to the world’s biggest video game. The result was a commercial disaster. But that is only part of the story
Super Mario Bros Movie 1993
It was the summer of 1992, a few weeks into the shooting of Super Mario Bros: The Motion Picture, and the atmosphere on set was heating up. Endless rewrites and script additions had turned the story and dialogue upside down. Producers, writers, and investors were working with the directors, the English couple Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton, for opposite ends. There were 300 extras on set waiting to shoot the next scene. The lines Hopper was about to deliver had been changed at the last moment, and not for the first time. He was dressed like a humanoid dinosaur, very groomed in the sweltering heat of North Carolina, his hair frozen in a strange row of reptilian spines.
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“We’re in King Koopa’s skyscraper bedroom; one big set,” says actor and co-star Richard Edson. “Dennis comes in and he looks really sad. He’s yelling at himself, he won’t look at anybody. So the directors were like, ‘Dennis, what’s up?’ he asks.”
The provocative actor-director, who apologetically told everyone he only took the role for the money, stopped in the middle of the splendor of his character’s penthouse suite and exploded. “She starts yelling at Annabel and Rocky,” Edson recalls. “He says they’re totally unprofessional, he’s never seen anything like it. Rocky shouts, “Dennis, what’s that?” and “You rewrote my lines!” You call that writing? This shit! This shit! And the fact that you did it without asking me? He continued, unable to control himself.
We had some dialogue and it was horrible. So I had this idea, let’s create our own. The writers couldn’t care less
“It went on for 45 minutes. The producers look at their watches, Rocky and Annabel look at each other, what can we do? The actors, oh my God, this was great, it was like better than this movie. Finally, they say let’s go to lunch – but lunch is what Dennis tells the directors. and it’s another two hours when he shouts to the producers about the state of the film production. Meanwhile, there are 300 extra waiting for the next scene. Rocky and Annabel start begging – Dennis, please tell us what you want and we will do anything.
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“But the shouting at them did not stop. People were knocking, the producers were coming out and trying to tell people what was going on. Finally Rocky and Annabel said, ‘Look, rewrite the scene or we’ll go back to the original, you want it,’ and finally he said, ‘Okay, now we’ll do the scene as it was written. ‘ Everyone sighs, we come back three and a half hours after it was supposed to be done, we do the scene as it was written when it started.
Dennis Hopper as the villain King Koopa has transformed from a giant toy turtle into a businessman descended from dinosaurs. Photo: Alamy Stock Photo
This anecdote reveals a lot about how the movie Super Mario Bros., which became a movie legend for all the wrong reasons, was made. But while it was a disaster in many different ways, it wasn’t as creatively devastating as it could have been. The film’s weird cyberpunk tone, epic dystopian sets, and combination of traditional animatronics with computer-generated effects were innovative and remain visually stunning – but none of this had much to do with Super Mario.
In 1990, director Roland Joffé, who had produced the critically acclaimed The Killing Fields and The Mission, wanted to get into film production. Finding that the highly successful Super Mario Bros. video games were a good fit for cinematic translation, he teamed up with Chariots of Fire executive producer Jake Eberts and headed to Japan to meet with Hiroshi Yamauchi , then the president of Nintendo.
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There were bigger studios researching the license, and Joffé had only raised a paltry $500,000 for the rights – but he had a good pitch, and most importantly, he was offering Nintendo all the profits from the sales. A $2 million settlement was reached. “They saw the film as some kind of strange creature, [intrigued] to see if it was walking,” Joffé said at the time.
The creature began to shake very quickly. Greg Beeman, a veteran director, was brought in and then dropped, probably because Mom and Dad Save the World were getting negative press coverage in Hollywood. Harold Ramis and Danny DeVito approached to take the helm – the latter to direct
Star – and both objected. Arnold Schwarzenegger turned down the role of turtle-like nemesis Bowser, while Tom Hanks was briefly attached to play Luigi.
But the script was the big problem. Joffé told Nintendo he wasn’t going to make a “sweet little love story” – he wanted a wider audience than children. “Joffé wanted to do for Super Mario Bros. what Burton did with Batman for superheroes,” says Steven Applebaum of the website Super Mario Bros: The Movie Archive. “He wanted to redefine the characters for young adults.”
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The first writer to try to write a screenplay was Barry Morrow, who won an Oscar for Rain Man. He wrote a sort of existential journey with Mario as the intelligent older brother and Luigi as the pure savant brother. He looked so familiar that the production team nicknamed him “Drain Man.” Then came Jim Jennewein and Tom S Parker, who had worked together on The Flintstones and Ri¢hie Ri¢h. Theirs was a sparkling bubblegum fantasy film set in the familiar Nintendo universe. At least it was in the right ballpark.
Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo left the film after being critically panned. Photo: Alamy Stock Photo
Meanwhile, without an upcoming director, Joffé turned to Jankel and Morton, who had only shot one Hollywood film: the obscure Dennis Quaid vehicle DOA. Morton and Jankel were pioneers in the use of computer graphics. Emerging from the late 70s art punk scene, they directed cutting-edge music videos and produced major commercials, including the first all-CGI commercial (for Pirelli tires). Most notably, they created Max Headroom for Channel 4, the faux CG personality who stars in a late night music video and then Morton and Jankel’s dark and witty cyberpunk TV movie Max Headroom : 20 Minutes into the Future. .
Joffé felt that their fresh, creative and sarcastic approach to technology would work for Super Mario, and he signed them up. However, the couple rejected the script Jennewein / Parker, and wanted to move away from the light tone of the Nintendo franchise. Their idea was to portray the evil King Koopa, better known as Bowser, as the corrupt president in an alternate dimension where humans evolved from dinosaurs. Its power base will be from Dinohat, a devastated dystopia, with its natural resources dwindling and falling into anarchy. “I wanted the movie to be more sophisticated,” Morton told Game Informer in 2011. “At the time, there was a lot of sentiment against video games. I wanted to make a film that opens up the subject and gets parents interested in video games.”
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Morton and Jankel pitched this concept to screenwriters Parker Bennett and Terry Runte, who worked together on Ethan Hawke’s feature film debut, Mystery Date and brought in veteran British screenwriters Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais to detail the story and the characters. They had worked on Porridge and The Likely Lads and provided the script for Alan Parker’s hit film The Commitments. It was this scenario that began to attract actors, including Bob Hoskins and Fiona Shaw, on board.
As these heavyweights were added, others followed. “My agent said I should take a look, it was going to be a $50 million movie, that was an incredible amount for 1992,” says Samantha Mathis, who plays Princess Daisy. “There were problems with the script, but the cast was so impressive that it seemed to elevate the material.”
Samantha Mathis as Princess Daisy with Yoshi, one of the most complex animatronic models of her time. Photo: Allstar/Cinetext Collection/Sportsphoto
In 1992, production accelerated and costs increased. The team began building a massive and elaborate set at the Ideal Cement Factory in Castle Hayne, North Carolina, a five-story mega-complex previously used as the backdrop in Terminator 2 and Ninja Turtles. Production designer David L Snyder, who worked on Blade Runner, envisioned a complex, multi-story future city dominated by neon signs and metal walkways. The set designers envisioned Dinohattan as a gritty cyberpunk metropolis full of bikers, gangsters and tattooed strippers. The costume designers dressed the huge cast in leather fetish clothing, mesh tights and trench coats. At this point, the film was about as far from Nintendo’s Super Mario aesthetic as it could get.
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Producers seeking funding have begun approaching potential investors and distributors, including Disney. But here the problems really started.
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