Original SUPER MARIO BROS. Directors Vindicated with Quentin Tarantino's Help After Being "Abandoned by Hollywood"

The original live-action 1993 adaptation of Super Mario Bros. was destroyed by critics and bombed at the box office. It’s been listed as one of the worst movies ever made, but you know what? It has a huge fan base and a cult following now! A lot of kids who saw this movie when it was first released like myself are now grown adults and many of them look back fondly on the movie.

The movie starred Bob Hoskins as Mario, John Leguizamo as Luigi, and Dennis Hopper as King Koopa. It was directed by husband and wife directing duo Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel, but the movie was so reviled that their movie directing career was flushed down the toilet. Hollywood abandoned them. It’s really all a messed-up story and up until recently, they didn’t seem to realize there was a fan base for the film.

Then on March 11th, Quentin Tarantino held a midnight screening of Super Mario Bros. at his New Beverly Cinema theater, and it was like that screening “washed away the stain.” During a recent interview with Variety, Morton talked about the experience, saying: “My thought was that there would be 10 or 20 people there. But it was jam-packed. There were people queueing up around the block for extra tickets.”

This was the first time they have watched their own film since it was originally released!

Morton went on to say that the audience was “laughing and clapping at all the right places. They weren’t doing it ironically; it was genuine.” Of course they were! I attended a home screening with a bunch of friends a few years ago to watch the movie, and it was the same reaction! We were loving it!

Jankel said she was amazed by the dozens of fans that asked her for autographs and selfies: “It was vindicating. It took 30 years of a bad feeling to be wiped out in one evening.” That must’ve been such a cool experience for them! Over the past 30 years they’ve lived with this stain on their career, something they feel they failed at, and now that’s gone! What a great feeling that must’ve been!

When talking about Tarantino’s screening of the film, Morton said: “I think Quentin Tarantino understands where we’re coming from, creatively. It’s a certain quirkiness that didn’t fit in nicely with the Hollywood scene at the time.”

Their movie was meant to be a prequel to the 1985 Super Mario Bros. video game, and Jankel shared that “We were never, ever trying to recreate the original game. Otherwise, we would have made the animated film.” The film was criticized for being too dark, but this new one is much more in line with the game, it’s the film that Nintendo wanted and they were heavily involved with the creative process. Nintendo wasn’t even involved with the first film, but they disliked it so hard that it took them 30 years to try again.

Morton went on to talk about how the point of the film was lost in translation. He explains that after Mario and Luigi complete their adventure, “Two executives from Nintendo turn up at the Mario Bros. apartment in Brooklyn. And they want to hear their story because it’s on the news, and they’re making a video game. It explains the reason why the film doesn’t literally follow the story in the game. It got lost in translation. The Mario Bros. told the Nintendo executives the story and it was misinterpreted. The film is meant to represent the actual story.”

Morton says he regrets that Nintendo wasn’t involved the first time around, and adds: “If I’d have had a relationship with Miyamoto and brought him onboard, if he had been a producer and he understood what we were doing, he wouldn’t have let certain things happen. We would have been a team, and it would have been a different film.”

But, in the end, a lot of people liked the way the film turned out! These days there are all kinds of fan-made films of classic properties that are made to look dark and gritty. Morton and Jankel were just ahead of their time. But after its failure, Morton says: “We were abandoned by Hollywood…”

Morton shared that before they shot the film, he had a “polite” meeting with Shigeru Miyamoto, where he explained the story to the Nintendo executive. They never spoke again, but apparently Miyamoto “actually liked our film.”

Miyamoto explained that it was the fan backlash that made them lock down any other film projects. He said: “We were fearful of all the failure of past IP adaptations, where there’s a license and a distance between the original creators and the creators of the films. The fans get outraged and mad because the studios didn’t do justice to the original work. We really didn’t want a backlash.” 

Morton does admit that the film is “a mess, structurally,” but he went on to defend it, saying: “Our achievement was creating something truly original, even though it was based on a video game. It was funny, it was sci-fi, it was fantasy, it was a love story. And I think it succeeded in all those elements. And the performances from a lot of the actors were great. I’m proud of the movie, and I stand by it.”

Then there’s the whole story of the film’s absolutely insane production! Stay tuned because stories from that are coming soon. For now, it’s great to hear that the directors of the original film are happy that people actually enjoy the film they made.

Source: Variety