“The worst thing I ever did? Super Mario Bros. It was a fuckin’ 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.”
These are the words of the late, great Bob Hoskins to Simon Hattenstone of the Guardian in 2007. Anyone who has actually seen the horrifyingly bad 1993 film he is talking about, known for being the first mainstream Hollywood adaptation of a video game, might wonder why we are about to get a remake. Here’s Dennis Hopper, who played villain King Koopa on his own feelings about the movie: “I made a picture called Super Mario Bros, and my six-year-old son at the time – he’s now 18 – he said, ‘Dad I think you’re probably a pretty good actor, 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 that badly.’”
Super Mario Bros is such an appallingly bad film that you wonder if perhaps, like the infamously bad 1994 Roger Corman version of Fantastic Four, it was only concocted to ensure the studio involved didn’t lose the rights. But no, this was considered a movie likely to flourish. Producer Roland Joffé and Max Headroom creators Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel (who were never to work as directors in Hollywood again) were given full creative licence by Nintendo, who apparently thought their brand was so strong that allowing the American film industry to jump on it couldn’t go wrong. Perhaps this is why it’s taken another 30 years for the venerable Japanese company to place its trust in Hollywood again.
Sadly, Super Mario Bros was just the first of a torrent of awful video game adaptations – many of them masterminded by inept German director Uwe Boll. Cheap Tolkien knock-off 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 dodgy vampire flick BloodRayne (2005).
Here, we are talking about a director so undistinguished that he is probably best known for beating up one of his critics. But video game movies have also proven a career-killing poisoned chalice for otherwise promising film-makers. Duncan Jones was a rising star of sci-fi film-making, having made 2009’s beguilingly ingenious Moon and 2011’s icky but intelligent Source Code, when he signed to make 2016’s Warcraft, based on the hugely popular World of Warcraft game. Suffice to say, a few heavily tusked orcs and tepid fantasy tropes later and Jones hasn’t made anything decent since. In fact, since the 2018 Netflix bomb Mute, he doesn’t seem to have made anything at all, which is rather sad when you consider his bravura early work.
For at least 25 years, Hollywood just didn’t seem able to work out how to make a good movie based on a video game. Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), the Resident Evil films and the more recent Assassin’s Creed adaptation (2016) all have one thing in common: they are great games that ended up as lukewarm, if not just plain rubbish filmgoing experiences. All of which suggests that the new Super Mario Bros Movie is either doomed from the outset, or faces a really low bar to success, depending on one’s point of view.
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Fortunately, we are not in the 90s any more, and Hollywood isn’t trying to make every video game into a live action spectacular – perhaps because they are too busy turning old animated classics into live action turkeys instead. Two years after the original 1993 Super Mario Bros film came Toy Story, which proved that fantasy film-making often works best when it arrives as an explosion of pixels and joy, rather than as a result of vast sums of money being misguidedly thrown at two middle-aged men dressed as Italian plumbers who really should have known better. The incredible success of CGI animation in that film’s wake, and more recently The Lego Movie’s adoption of meta-cinema as a means to keep parents and kids engrossed by the same movie on different levels, means we no longer have to panic before heading to the multiplexes. Recent offerings such as 2019’s Pokemon Detective Pikachu and last year’s Sonic the Hedgehog 2 have been, though scarcely superb, at least unlikely to make anyone walk out of the cinema.
One can easily imagine the new Super Mario Bros Movie being greenlit after the success of the very funny Wreck-It-Ralph movies, which gorgeously satirised video-gaming across the decades. But why invent an entirely new platform hero (or villain) when the true original has never quite had his day in the sun? The new film comes to us as a joint production from Nintendo and Illumination, makers 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 every chance that, in 30 years’ time, they won’t all be lamenting how taking on the film was the worst decision they ever made. Why? Because in the decades since 1993’s Super Mario Bros, Hollywood has levelled up when it comes to this kind of film. That doesn’t mean The Super Mario Bros Movie will be topping 2023’s end-of-year critics’ lists, but three decades on from its infamously lamentable predecessor, it’s unlikely to be marking “game over” for any careers this time around.