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Feature
Super Mario Bros.: An In-depth Look
We explore this movie adaption full of creepy lizard-head thugs, John Leguizamo, and an underground fungus-filled metropolis. What could possibly go wrong?
By: Sean Gandert
Super Mario Bros. is not a good movie to dispel the "films based on videogames suck" stereotype. If anything it set this trope down in stone, then made a cast out of that stone and used it to create a nearly unbreakable steel alloy so thick no other films, despite the talents of the people behind them, could dispel it. No one saw this going in, though, and while the expectation level for game-to-film adaptations is now at a level usually reserved for Rob Schneider films, pictures from the mind (or any other body part) of M. Night Shyamalan, or spoofs that follow the "_____ Movie" formula, at the time there was a real sense that Super Mario Bros. could have been something. It coulda been the proverbial contender. This was the future, and Hollywood was on the cutting edge of the next big thing. Boy, were they wrong.
How Allied (and to a lesser extent Disney) got the property from Nintendo remains lost in the mists of time, which is to say internal memos I have no access to, but it was clearly an A-level production from the beginning. Most game adaptations have been either large-budget studio affairs focus-grouped into oblivion and lacking an ounce of creativity, or no-budget vanity projects designed only to make a quick buck and lacking an ounce of creativity. Super Mario Bros. was neither. It was made by Allied Filmmakers, an anomalous British production company specializing in prestige independent features with budgets decidedly on the high end of the independent spectrum. The Mario project received $48 million in funding, which would be more or less $70 million today. By way of comparison, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, and something like 23 Paranormal Activities could all be made for less than that. Or, like, 1/10 of Waterworld. It's all relative.
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