Super Mario bros Movie
Why it a flopped.
Today we’re taking a look at Super Mario Bros. Nintendo’s biggest
and most prised mascots. Publishes as a pseudo-sequel by Nintendo in 1983.
It
was originally released in Japan for the family computer on September 13th 1985,
and later that year for the Nintendo Entertainment System in North America,
Europe and Australia on the 15th May 1985. It was the first of the
super Mario series of games. The game featured plumbing brothers Mario and
Luigi as they travel through the mushroom kingdom bashing and stomping on
baddies with an end goal of rescuing Princess peach.
Game vs Movie; Super Mario Bros video.
The games mid-80’s release popularised the side-scrolling
subgenre of the already popular platform video game of the early 80’s. In addition to its definitive features, the
game has sold enormously well, and was the biggest selling game of all time for
a single platform for approximately 3 decades at over 40 million units.
Needless to say the super Mario Bros series was and is a big
deal, with all its success at the time there’s no doubt Nintendo was onto
something big. And it wasn’t too long before Hollywood come knocking at Nintendo’s
door step. So why a movie, you ask?
By the 1990’s super Mario bros was the biggest intellectual property
on the planet, super Mario land had just been released in japan and Nintendo’s pixelated
plumber was slapped on everything from cereal boxes to T-shits and comic books.
Mario’s name alone was worth millions.
Nintendo was cautious with
its property. The publisher knew Super Mario Bros. didn’t have a deep
narrative. How would a movie studio translate the simple formula into a
90-minute film?
Skeptical? Well…
Producer Roland Joffé of
Lightmotive thought he could figure it out. Joffé’s production company was
inexperienced, but (picture of but) had directed the Oscar-nominated films The
Killing Fields and The Mission, which gave the studio some credibility.
Despite numerous offers from
bigger and more experienced companies, who by the way offered way way.. More
money for the rights to the film.
Nintendo was intrigued by
Joffé’s ideas, what was more interesting is the fact that Joffé had agreed to
let Nintendo retain merchandising rights from the film. A very strategic move,
enabling him to walk away with a $2 million dollar contract. Hollywood was in
uproar. No one could quite believe that a small time filmmaker had bagged the
most sought after brand name of the decade. In a rare moment for the character,
Mario’s future was now partially out of Nintendo’s control.
After securing the rights to
the film, Lightmotive immediately set to work trying to sign high-level talent.
The studio approached Danny DeVito to both direct the film and play Mario. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Michael Keaton were
approached for the role of King Koopa, but all three passed on
the project.
Even Tom Hanks was approached
to play Mario, but the executives thought that Hanks was asking for too much
money, so they fired Hanks in favor of Bob Hoskins. Hoskins was hot off the
success of films like Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Hook, so the producers felt
that he would be a more bankable star.
While Lightmotive continued
its search for actors and directors, it commissioned the first of many scripts.
Barry Morrow, one of the Academy Award-winning writers of Rain Man, took first
crack at the plot, but his treatment was deemed too dramatic and the project
was passed over to the writing team that had worked on The Flintstones and
Richie Rich.
This version of the script
was more inline with Mario’s roots. Mario and Luigi traveled to a magical land
where the evil King Koopa – an actual green lizard king – had kidnapped a
Princess named Hildy and made her his bride, so that he could access the
magical Crown of Invincibility.
The Mario brothers and their sidekick Toad set
off on a quest to rescue the princess and prevent Koopa from getting his hands
on the artifact. Done easy, there you have a script
directly in line with the game.
This script was likely the
closest the film would ever get to mirror the playful world imagined in
Nintendo’s games. However, Lightmotive had already signed a directorial team to
the project, Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel, and thus
opening up a world of uncertainties for the future of the film.
Morton and Jankel’s vision for the film was much darker than Nintendo
game series. The film to take place in an alternate reality version of New York,
a place called Dinohatten. After an asteroid had struck earth 65 million years
ago, banishing all the planet’s dinosaurs to a dystopian version of our world,
basically an alternate world. But the two realities are still connected
by a portal under New York.
As eons passed the dinosaurs grew to hate the humanoids that
blissfully walked on the earth’s surface.
Nintendo’s hands were off the project at this point,
According to one of the directors, and I quote. “Nintendo let us do
what we wanted; they put a crushing deadline on the project. The movie had to
be made by a certain date otherwise there were all these financial penalties.
Which added a lot of extra stress on the project”, unquote.
The directors and producers struggled to agree on a script to match the
movie’s new direction. More rewrites were issued. Some scripts contained inspirations from Die
Hard; another script featured a Mad Max-style death race. The Super Mario bros
film was pulling inspirations from everywhere and everything, which spiralled the
production of the entire project out of control.
And this didn’t do the film or Nintendo’s reputation any good, you
would think with an asset as valuable as the Mario franchise you would do
everything in your power to see that it turns out great or at least good. But
they were in a hurry to get things done, making poor decisions on the overall
production of the movie.
By mid-1992 production was well under way. Holding the director’s inspiration
for a darker film, at this same period there was a hard core movement against
video games, and a lot of anti-video game sentiment, so to appeal to the better
side of the public the directors steered the film towards an older demographic
and not the younger population that the Super Mario Bros franchise captured the
hearts of in the first place.
Director Morton said, and I quote “I wanted the film to be more
sophisticated, (wait what? Super Mario isn’t sophisticated, it’s a game
designed to capture the like-minded imaginations of gamers and adolescence that
according scientists, get a buzz off playing video games. So when you throw sophistication into the
midst of something that’s innocent and simple at its core, you’re bound to end
up with something that looks like Jackal and Hyde on steroids) He carried
saying that, “I wanted parents to really get into it, I wanted to make a film
that would get parents interested in video games”.
As previously stated, you can’t make a film to appeal to a demographic
that’s not your target audience. It’s
just not going to work. (So that’s
another no no)
Of course not everyone shared Morton and Jankel’s vision for the film;
the studio was expecting a lighthearted kid’s film, and most of the cast and
crew signed on with the same expectations.
The tensions between these two visions
put an even bigger strain on the film as the studio felt the film was too dark,
pressuring Morton and Jankel to lighten the tone, Lightmotive brought in the
writer from Bill and Ted’s excellent adventures to write yet another version of
the script. But Morton refuses to work with him stating that he already had the
set built and some characters with prosthetics had already been made. So that
script came in but, a lot of it didn’t match what they had already started
working on.
By this point at least nine writers worked on the project, and
rewrites would continue long after the cameras started rolling. The script ballooned into a mushroom of
confusion as the production crew was handed new daily edits, Dennis Hopper
claimed that the script had probably been rewritten five or six times by the
time he arrived, aside from script issues and an inexperience production team,
there were tension on set.
Head of production Joffé recalls finding the directors and cast locked
in script meetings in the middle of shooting over a scene that’s eleven lines
long, ‘I had to jolly everyone back on set’, he stated. “It was like being a
school master”. Morton and Jankel would
often find themselves in the producer’ trailer on a nightly basis, being told
they were going to be fired, as they’re doing a poor job, they’re spending too
much money and the whole thing was a disaster.
Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo on the other hand admitted to booze on
set, taking shots of scotch between scenes to get through the disaster that was
the Super Mario bros making. Hoskins was
particular aggrieved by the husband and wife duo, later revealing in an
exclusive interview with The Guardian, quoting. “It was the worst thing I ever
did, super Mario bros. “it was a fucking nightmare. The whole experience was a
nightmare. It had a husband and wife team directing, whose arrogance had been
mistaken for talent. After so many weeks, their own agent told them to get off
the set. Fuckin’ nightmare, fuckin’ idiots”. Unquote.
By many accounts Rocky Morton and Anabel Jankel was out of their depts.
The husband and wife team didn’t have many movie credits to their names. In
fact, they had only directed one other film, a critical and commercial bomb
called D.O.A… The couple’s paved their way by creating commercials for
Coco-cola and Hardees restaurants, eventually finding small success after
creating the television series Max Headroom. Lightmotive loved Max Headroom’s
zany vibe and felt that Morton and Jankel had the right imagination for a film
like Super Mario Bros.
But how wrong were they right??
Despite Morton and Jankel’s vision for a movie that sounded nothing
like Nintendo’s series, the duo attentively worked in a few video game
references. Yoshi appeared as King Koop’s pet, and briefly previewed the SNES
Super scopes functioned as portable de-evolution guns during the film’s climax.
However one key reference almost didn’t make the cut; Morton and Jankel didn’t
want the Mario brothers to appear in their classic red and green overalls. They
fought with the producers for weeks but finally gave in, allowing Mario and
Luigi to don their plumber’s outfits around three fourths of the way into the
film.
There was so much wrong with the overall project that it’s
unrecognisable, in fact the only resemblance the film had to the game is Mario
and Luigi’s outfits, Yoshi, and the fact that they had to save a princess, if
you played the game the movie makes no sense.
There were too many flaws in the script that had to be plugged and
worked on during shooting, which lead to a lot of rewrites and ad-libbing just
to make sense of everything. And all
this came with a price,
Over budget, behind schedule and managing a cast that was either
drunk, working off script, or completely belligerent, Super Mario Bros had run
completely off the rails. The project was a train wreck.
When the film had its red carpet premiere it was apparent to everyone
that it captured none of the magic of the games, released on May 28, 1993. The
film cost $48 million to make and grossed less than $21 million.
From everyone’s point of view, the film was a mess; it got rushed into
production with a script that has been written two weeks prior to filming, and
actors singing on unprepared to improvise dialog.
Miyamoto has yet to comment candidly on Hollywood’s basterdisation of
his most iconic creation.
A lot of excuse can be made for Super Mario Bros movie; it was made
during a different ere. No one had tried to make a big-budget video game movie
before. Or Nintendo didn’t know how much
input they should have on the production.
One can also argue that that special
effects technology limited directors’ abilities to portray the fantastic
elements often found in games. However, it’s hard to escape the fact that super
Mario bros was a bad film, a by-product of bad choices and unfortunate mishaps.
The super Mario Bros movie should stand as a testament for how not to make a
video game movie.
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