So what exactly made the 1993 Super Mario Bros movie bad?

[lazygecko]

Something I started thinking about since it feels like the film being firmly in the pantheon of "bad video game movies" seems to have become this self-perpetuating narrative that just gets mindlessly repeated without any real critical thought put into it. Basically the only things that do get acknowledged are that 1: It was a very loose interpretation of the source material, 2: the filming/production was a nightmare and Bob Hoskins absolutely hated working on it, and 3: Nintendo regretted the decision and caused them to back away from film licensing until very recently.

 

Now, I can understand that people would be disappointed that it is not a faithful interpretation of the source material, but apart from that none of these things really say anything about the quality of the film on its own merits. Plenty of films have had very troubled developments but still come out great in the end. And I find the whole re-imagining of the world as this dystopian cyberpunk-esque setting to actually be pretty fun and bold move with the amount of thought they put into recontexualizing all the game elements to fit the setting. It's very different from typical boneheaded Hollywood decisions you otherwise see like cutting out the hell and demon themes from Doom entirely.

 

I haven't seen the movie in its entirety again in a long time, but watching clips of it on Youtube it does seem like a pretty fun romp that would be inoffensive at worst. Hardly something I would call bad and difficult to watch. And even though the main cast don't really have their hearts in the project off camera, they do their jobs and Dennis Hopper gets to chew the scenery.

 

Basically what spurred my thought on the whole thing was The Last of Us HBO series that just came out, which is more or less a rigid 1:1 adaptation of a game that already aspires to be as cinematic and live action-adjacent as it can be in its presentation and performance, which I find so fundamentally uninteresting and superfluous as an adaptation, and the original SMB movie is something you'd find at the exact opposite end of the spectrum.

[Rudolph]

I honestly do not think it is bad at all; I even used to love it as a child. Honestly, the worst part about the movie is incidentally the references to Super Mario Bros: they feel so tacked-on that they could have been omitted altogether and the movie would have still worked as a cheesy cyberpunk comedy.

 

Honestly, as far as video game movie adaptations, I find Max Payne to be so much worse: it is neither a good adaptation nor a good action movie.

[dasho]

56 minutes ago, lazygecko said:

Something I started thinking about since it feels like the film being firmly in the pantheon of "bad video game movies" seems to have become this self-perpetuating narrative that just gets mindlessly repeated without any real critical thought put into it.

 

I'd wager most kids don't want to go see a movie that's so far removed from its source material that they have to use 'critical thought' to see how the world was 'recontextualized' into a completely unrelated setting. Many of said kids probably grew into the adults that are expressing their dislike for the movie.

[heliumlamb]

Mass Hysteria

[Murdoch]

Uh... a script that was clearly the product of the screenwriter(s) doing all the drugs? Like, at once?

[Jello]

Yeah, the real problem was the target audience for a Mario movie was around 5-11 years old. The kids who loved Mario Brothers at the time; and the movie had absolutely nothing to do with it. I saw it in the theater, my Mom took my older brother and I to see it, and we were excited. And we walked out thinking that that wasn't a Mario movie. I remember my Mom asking us "Did any of that happen in the Mario games?". And she really liked playing the first game on NES, she was a beast when it came to Super Mario Bros, and she really enjoyed Super Mario Bros 3. She was just as confused as we were.

 

Looking back, it wasn't terrible, and it can be enjoyable because the premise is so ridiculous; but the target audience expected a Mario movie. That's what was wrong with it, and if they had completely removed all references to the Mario games, it would actually be an enjoyable piece of schlock entertainment. Something along the line of Total Recall. Both Hopkins Hopper and Leguizamo had really good performances in the movie, and it could've worked. The problem was it had to be tied to Mario Bros... which didn't work.

 

If it was a self contained movie, it would've been a cult classic, but still a bad movie. As a movie tied to a kid friendly video game franchise, it deserved to fail because it had nothing to do with the source content. A Mario movie shouldn't have been made, there was nowhere near enough content or 'lore' to justify it. And it shows.

 

*Edited: Why the Hell do I still get Anthony Hopkins and Dennis Hopper mixed up after all these years?

Edited January 21, 2023 by Jello

[DNSKILL5]

Idk, the movie is fine as a movie, but not as a Mario Bros movie. It’s sort of how I feel about the Resident Evil movies, the first Doom movie, and the JCVD Street Fighter movie. I find those movies to be entertaining for what they are, but they are poor representations of the source material. 
 

The Mario movie specifically, it has plenty of references to the games, some even that only die-hard fans would notice, others much more obvious, but nothing about the movie really feels like the game. The introduction has the Mario theme, but that’s the only time I recall it being used, and the whole dinosaur thing was a really weak attempt at trying to make the game world aspects they did use to somehow make sense in *our* world, and this shows how little faith they had in making the movie closer to the source. 
 

Anyways, sure, there are people that find most of these movies I mention to suck but I often wonder if they’d feel the same way if they saw the movie and had no understanding or connection to the games they’re based on, but putting the lack of faith in the source to the side, whether the movies are good or not as their own thing is subjective.

 

At least for me, I find the Mario Bros movie to be entertaining. It is so bizarre and if anything will give you a lot of laughs. There is a lot of nice set pieces, good actors too. It fails as a Mario Bros movie but as a strange comedy I think it works well enough as its own thing. 

[Mr. Freeze]

The Mario movie is awesome WDYM. Nothing that lets Dennis Hopper ham it up can be considered bad. 

[Noiser]

I like it a lot. The set design is very cool:

[Herr Dethnout]

the movie itself

[BerserkerNoir]

I didnt even know there was a movie from that year lol.
 

[SuperFreaksDev]

It's actually genuinely a good movie. By no means does it resemble Mario but nowadays with how sterile Mario is as a franchise it's actually kind of fun to see it reinterpreted as a weirdo dinosaur Blade Runner, especially with how good the set design and special effects are for their time. Worth noting an old workprint was found with deleted scenes thought to be lost, Nintendo took it down but it's likely still floating around the internet archive somewhere

[Azuris]

It depends on what you want:

 

- A Reinterpretation of the Mario World in a dystopian Way

- A faithful Adaption of the Mario World true to the Games

 

I think before doing first one, you need some faithful Movies/Shows, so that People are ok for something different.
But back then People where hungry for the original Stuff.

So i would say, it was just a Matter of Time until the Disapointment had to disappear.

[Spooner5020]

I personally love it!! To me personally why I think people hated it was because it felt like a movie that originally had NOTHING to do with Mario, but the studio or whoever wouldn’t sign off on the script unless it was based on an existing property. 

[Rudolph]

9 hours ago, Jello said:

A Mario movie shouldn't have been made, there was nowhere near enough content or 'lore' to justify it. And it shows.

An animated Mario movie would have worked. I mean, there were several cartoon shows and they were fine.

 

I do not understand why studios waste their time with live-action adaptations. 

[Biodegradable]

14 minutes ago, Rudolph said:

An animated Mario movie would have worked. I do not understand why studios waste their time with live-action adaptations. 

 

Because it was cheaper to do so. Even 30 years ago, animated films were expensive to produce. Toy Story wouldn't come out for another two years, so the technology to produce animated movies slightly faster wasn't even a thing yet.

[Rudolph]

6 minutes ago, Biodegradable said:

Because it was cheaper to do so.

I do not necessarily buy it.

 

Again, they made Mario cartoons, so would it have been that expensive to produce even a slightly-better-animated feature-length Mario movie?

[Thelokk]

Nothing, it's a fine movie that's great at what it does. Deniers can keep seething. 

[Biodegradable]

17 minutes ago, Rudolph said:

I do not necessarily buy it.

 

Again, they made Mario cartoons, so would it have been that expensive to produce even a slightly-better-animated feature-length Mario movie?

 

If you wanted it to have the same quality as other animated films of the era? Absolutely.

[mrthejoshmon]

This actually reminds me of a wider issue in general.

 

I love consuming bad media, I love bad games, movies, tv shows, videos ect. However an issue I often bump into is hardcore average mediocrity (or hell, even perfectly passable stuff) hyped up to be The Room 2, often to my disappointment.

 

One example that lives rent free in my head is the PS1 game Danger Girl, some YouTube personality hyped that shit up to be the devil and it was instead incredibly fine, very passable, literally everything he complained about wasn't an issue, I wanted fucking garbage like Rascal and I got an actual game instead.

 

It's so common for people to get super fucking hyperbolic about mid shit that it gets genuinely hard to figure out what's actually garbage from hearsay alone, gotta get boots on the ground now.

 

Also, everyone keeps saying the Doom movie is shit but really it's just mid, if it was an unlicensed sci-fi action movie you'd probably like it.

[arsac]

it's like blade runner 2049 but for kids

[Rudolph]

1 hour ago, mrthejoshmon said:

Also, everyone keeps saying the Doom movie is shit but really it's just mid, if it was an unlicensed sci-fi action movie you'd probably like it.

Nah, it is just shit. I like Dwayne Johnson as an actor, but the movie is just incredibly bland and uninteresting - with the exception of the first-person sequence, which would have been impressive... in a 90s FMV rail shooter. Even the first live-action Resident Evil movie was better than this.

[msx2plus]

rare case of an absolute production trainwreck leading to something that's genuinely fun. great set design and effect work. generally speaking i prefer loose adaptations of ideas where the authors are able to bring their own vision to the table, so SMB'93 works for me. Morton & Jankel were absolutely bonkers picks for directors. definitely check out Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future if you haven't.

 

2 hours ago, mrthejoshmon said:

It's so common for people to get super fucking hyperbolic about mid shit that it gets genuinely hard to figure out what's actually garbage from hearsay alone, gotta get boots on the ground now.

truthfully, it's hard to dunk on heartful "garbage". it's so much easier to get frustrated over something boring, so plenty of people go off on snorefests instead. which, i mean, fair - boring is just about as bad as it gets.

[LoatharMDPhD]

Johnny Legs drinking on set and busting up the lead's arm with a little drinking and driving... countless rewrites... Dennis Hopper giving a damn and his every effort to actually act in a picture that doesn't deserve it.. like having Sir Alan Rickman in his 60's performing at Chucky Cheesse's.... but i guess it has a patina of sorts... rose tinted retrospectives and whatnot..

 

[Jello]

I just stumbled across this, it got a chuckle out of me:

 

[Rudolph]

45 minutes ago, LoatharMDPhD said:

like having Sir Alan Rickman in his 60's performing at Chucky Cheesse's

His character in Galaxy Quest in a nutshell! :P

[LoatharMDPhD]

35 minutes ago, Jello said:

I just stumbled across this, it got a chuckle out of me:

 

"Because I'm the MADMAN!!!"

[OliveTree]

nothing made it bad -- its good

[lazygecko]

1 hour ago, Rudolph said:

His character in Galaxy Quest in a nutshell! :P

 

"I used to play King Lear" was something Bob Hoskins said about his role in Super Mario Bros, and the exact same quote was one of Rickman's lines in Galaxy Quest.

[SuperFreaksDev]

Bob Hoskins was unironically a great live action Mario, he was perfectly cast. That's one thing it definitely has over the new movie!