“YouWorst thing I’ve ever done? Super Mario Bros. was a fucking nightmare. The entire experience was a nightmare. He led a husband and wife team whose arrogance had been mistaken for talent. After so many weeks, their own agent told them to get off the set! Damn nightmare. Damn idiots.
These are the words of the late, great Bob Hoskins to The Guardian’s Simon Hattenstone in 2007. Anyone who’s seen the horribly bad 1993 movie he’s talking about, known for being Hollywood’s first mainstream adaptation of a video game, might wonder. why we are about to have a new version. Here’s Dennis Hopper, who played the villain King Koopa on his own feelings about the movie: “I did a movie called Super Mario Bros, and my six-year-old son at the time, he’s 18 now, he said, ‘Dad, I think you’re probably an actor. pretty good, but why did you play that terrible guy, King Koopa, in Super Mario Bros.?’ And I said, ‘Well, Henry, I did that so you could have shoes,’ and he said, ‘Dad, I don’t need shoes so badly.'”
Super Mario Bros is such a terribly bad movie that one wonders if perhaps, like Roger Corman’s infamously bad 1994 version of the Fantastic Four, it was only made up to ensure the studio involved didn’t lose the rights. But no, this was considered a movie with a chance to thrive. Producer Roland Joffé and Max Headroom creators Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel (that they would never work as directors in Hollywood again) received full creative license from Nintendo, who apparently thought their brand was so strong that letting the American film industry jump on it couldn’t go wrong. Perhaps that is why the venerable Japanese company has taken another 30 years to trust Hollywood again.
Sadly, Super Mario Bros. was just the first in a torrent of gruesome video game adaptations, many of them masterminded by inept German director Uwe Boll. Tolkien’s cheap imitation In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (2008) may be the worst of them, which is saying something when you’re competing with the execrable Postal (2007) and the dubious vampire flick BloodRayne (2005). .
Here we are talking about a director so mediocre that he is probably best known for bashing one of his critics. But video game movies have also proven to be a poisonous chalice that kills the careers of up-and-coming filmmakers. Duncan Jones was a rising star of sci-fi filmmaking, having made 2009’s seductively witty Moon and 2011’s repulsively clever Source Code, when he signed on to make 2016’s Warcraft, based on the hugely popular game world of warcraft. Suffice it to say, after a few big fanged orcs and tepid fantasy tropes, Jones hasn’t done anything decent since. In fact, since Netflix’s Mute bombshell of 2018, he doesn’t seem to have done anything at all, which is pretty sad considering the bravura of his early work.
For at least 25 years, Hollywood couldn’t seem to figure out how to make a good movie based on a video game. Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), the Resident Evil movies, and the most recent adaptation of Assassin’s Creed (2016) all have one thing in common: they’re great games that ended up being tepid, if not bland. Trash movie experiences. All of which suggests that the new Super Mario Bros. movie is either doomed from the start or faces a very low bar for success, depending on one’s point of view.
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Thankfully, we’re not in the ’90s anymore, and Hollywood isn’t trying to turn every video game into a live-action spectacle, perhaps because they’re too busy turning old classics animated into live action turkeys instead. Two years after the original 1993 Super Mario Bros. movie came Toy Story, proving that fantasy movie-making often works best when it comes as an explosion of pixels and joy, rather than as a result of big bucks. which are mistakenly thrown at two people. middle-aged men dressed as Italian plumbers who really should have known better. The incredible success of CGI animation in the wake of that film, and, more recently, the meta-cinema’s adoption of The Lego Movie as a means of keeping parents and children engrossed in the same movie on different levels, means we no longer have to go into in a panic before heading to the multiplex. Recent offerings like 2019’s Pokémon Detective Pikachu and last year’s Sonic the Hedgehog 2 have been, while hardly excellent, at least unlikely to make anyone walk out of the theater.
One can easily imagine the new Super Mario Bros. movie getting the green light after the success of the very funny Wreck-It-Ralph movies, which magnificently lampooned video games over the decades. But why invent an entirely new platforming hero (or villain) when the true original has never had its day in the sun? The new film comes to us as a joint production of Nintendo and Illumination, creators of the Despicable Me films, with The Lego Movie’s Chris Pratt as Mario, Jack Black as Bowser, and Seth Rogen as the voice of Donkey Kong.
There’s a good chance that 30 years from now, not everyone will be lamenting that accepting the movie was the worst decision they ever made. Because? Because in the decades since 1993’s Super Mario Bros, Hollywood has leveled up when it comes to these kinds of movies. That doesn’t mean The Super Mario Bros Movie will top the 2023 year-end critics’ lists, but three decades after its infamously sorry predecessor, it’s unlikely to mark “game over” for any run this time around.
