For years, Hollywood has had an incredibly arduous time figuring out how to properly bring a video game to life on the silver screen. The results of these efforts range from mediocre to downright awful. One of the worst offenders of the cinematic video game genre came in the form of Super Mario Bros. in 1993. The film’s low quality has become nothing if not iconic, and now the director of the film seems to have a reason for why the project fell so flat.
In a recent interview with SciFiNow, Super Mario Bros. director Rocky Morton explained what he thinks went wrong with the infamously bad video game movie. He said:
Yeah, because Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais’ script was the script that Annabel and I wanted to make. It was a different script, and the actors were all brought onboard for that script, and then it was completely changed. I had to stand by with the new script, obviously, and tell them that it was great when I knew it wasn’t. They were all saying, ‘Where’s the original script? Where’s the one we liked?’ and we’d have to tell them it’s all new, it’s all new and different now. So everybody was angsty and uppity, and the whole thing was thrown into turmoil because of that one decision.
So it seems that the film everyone thought they would produce was infinitely better than the film they got to make. Everybody involved with the adaptation signed on for the script penned by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, which apparently had some truly inspired ideas buried within its pages. However, the shooting script provided by the studio had an insane amount of changes made to it, which completely muddled the story. These alterations caused a great deal of tension on the set, and ultimately threw the production into "turmoil." Judging by the final product of the 1993 Bob Hoskins/John Leguizamo fronted affair, we're inclined to believe Mr. Morton.
Just in case you happen to be unfamiliar with the Super Mario Bros. movie (lucky you) check out the trailer for the abominable adaptation below:
I’m genuinely sorry to have shown you that, but we needed to hammer home the point of how bad that film is. Knowing what made the film terrible doesn’t change the fact that we absolutely loathe Super Mario Bros., but it at the very least provides us with an explanation of how a beloved video game movie went so wrong. With movies like Assassin’s Creed still on the way, we're holding out hope that Hollywood has learned from its mistakes, and will one day give us the video game movie that we genuinely deserve.
