Original ‘Super Mario Bros.’ Directors Were ‘Abandoned by Hollywood’ After ‘Reviled’ 1993 Film. Then Quentin Tarantino Helped Vindicate Them
Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel, directors of 1993's live-action 'Super Mario Bros.' movie, defend their box office bomb and discuss what went wrong.
variety.com
Original ‘Super Mario Bros.’ Directors Were ‘Abandoned by Hollywood’ After ‘Reviled’ 1993 Film. Then Quentin Tarantino Helped Vindicate Them
By Ethan Shanfeld
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Everett Collection (40749)
Last month, Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel went to the theater to see “Super Mario Bros.,” a movie they directed 30 years ago — and haven’t watched since.
The live-action 1993 film, starring Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo as Mario and Luigi, bombed at the box office and landed on various “Worst Movies of All Time” lists, later developing a passionate cult following. In the directors’ own words, “Super Mario Bros.” was so “reviled” that it left a “black mark” on the married couple’s careers.
That is, until a midnight screening held at Quentin Tarantino’s New Beverly Cinema on March 11 “washed away the stain.”
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“My thought was that there would be 10 or 20 people there,” Morton tells Variety. “But it was jam-packed. There were people queueing up around the block for extra tickets.” During the film, Morton says the audience was “laughing and clapping at all the right places. They weren’t doing it ironically; it was genuine.”
“It was like being at a film festival,” Jankel adds, amazed that dozens of fans approached her for autographs and selfies. “It was vindicating. It took 30 years of a bad feeling to be wiped out in one evening.”
The screening came after Tarantino shouted out Morton and Jankel on his podcast, “The Video Archives Podcast,” in which he and Roger Avary revisit classic films and VHS gems. On the show, the “Pulp Fiction” director applauded Morton and Jankel’s first feature film, 1988’s “D.O.A.”
“I think Quentin Tarantino understands where we’re coming from, creatively,” Morton says. “It’s a certain quirkiness that didn’t fit in nicely with the Hollywood scene at the time.”
The timing of Jankel and Morton’s day in the sun is not lost on them. On April 5, Universal released “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” an animated blockbuster starring Chris Pratt as the mustachioed plumber, plus an A-list ensemble featuring Anya Taylor-Joy, Jack Black, Charlie Day, Seth Rogen and Keegan-Michael Key. The movie is expected to debut to more than $125 million this week.
Released 30 years apart, the two films could not be more different. The 1993 film, which is meant to be a prequel to the 1985 Super Mario Bros. game, features a parallel universe populated with humanoid dinosaurs who live in the city of Dinohattan. When NYU archaeology student Daisy, who is later revealed to be a descendant of the dinosaurs, is kidnapped by King Koopa’s henchmen, Brooklyn plumbers Mario and Luigi must rescue her with the help of Toad, portrayed here as a punk guitarist. “We were never, ever trying to recreate the original game,” Jankel says. “Otherwise, we would have made the animated film.”
While the ‘93 film, the first big-screen adaptation of a video game, was criticized for being too dark, the 2023 movie is, as Morton puts it, “the film that everybody wants.” After all, it’s been touted as a more faithful adaptation of the video game series and is animated by Illumination, the Chris Meledandri-led studio behind “Despicable Me,” the highest-grossing animated franchise in history.
Perhaps the biggest advantage the new movie has is Nintendo, which had zero involvement in the ‘93 film. Not only is the gaming giant a producer on the 2023 movie, but Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Super Mario Bros., co-produced the film with Meledandri and was involved every step of the way, from casting to animation to developing the story. Nintendo’s distance from the original film is something that, in hindsight, Morton regrets.
“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,” he says. “We would have been a team, and it would have been a different film.”
Produced by a Disney subsidiary, “Super Mario Bros.” was viewed as a licensing experiment by Nintendo, which yielded creative control to the film’s backers. Morton recalls having a “polite” meeting with Miyamoto ahead of production — where he explained the story to the Nintendo executive — but they never spoke again. “He actually liked our film,” Morton claims.
But the reception to the movie spooked Miyamoto and kept Mario off the big screen for three decades. In this week’s Variety cover story, Miyamoto 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.” Without specifically referencing the ‘93 movie, he added, “The fans get outraged and mad because the studios didn’t do justice to the original work. We really didn’t want a backlash.”
The production of 1993’s “Super Mario Bros.” was marred by drunken actors (Leguizamo later claimed he drank whiskey with Hoskins during shooting), last-minute rewrites and explosive fights between the producers and the directors.
“Two weeks before the first day of principal photography, the script was rewritten completely,” Morton says. “The producers forbade me to talk to the writer. But I called him up one night because I was building all these incredible sets and monsters and prosthetics. And I said, ‘You need to know what I’m building and what to keep in the script, because we spent all this money on this stuff already.’ When the producers found out I did this call, they went absolutely ballistic at me — they ripped into me. And it scared me.”
Morton continues, “Of course, the actors all signed up on our original script, and when the new script came in, Annabel and I had to justify the new script. We had to pretend that it was great and convince the actors to go along with it.”
Over the years, the dysfunction and turmoil of “Super Mario Bros.” has been widely reported: the actors complaining about the rewrites, the directors insulting the crew, the actors mocking the directors. In one of his memoirs, Leguizamo wrote that Morton poured hot coffee on an extra — an incident that Morton has since said was blown out of proportion. In a 1992 Los Angeles Times article detailing the chaos on set, “Super Mario Bros.” star Dennis Hopper said, “The directors won’t give interviews? That’s the smartest thing I’ve heard from them. That’s the only intelligent thing I’ve heard that they’ve really actually done.”
The day after that story ran, CAA fired Morton and Jankel. “It was the end of our movie careers,” he says.
But the film hadn’t even come out yet. When it did, it failed to recoup its $48 million budget and was trashed by critics. Variety’s review at the time called the film “wildly overproduced and derivative.” But perhaps what stung more than the box office blunder and bad reviews was the “Super Mario Bros.” cast speaking out against the film and Morton and Jankel.
Decades after its release, Hoskins said “Super Mario Bros.” was the “biggest disappointment” of his career, calling the production a “nightmare” and the directors “fuckin’ idiots.” And while Leguizamo has softened on “Mario” in recent years, saying he is “proud of the movie in retrospect,” Hopper pulled no punches when it came to disparaging the movie — and Morton and Jankel. “It was a husband-and-wife directing team who were both control freaks and wouldn’t talk before they made decisions,” Hopper said in 2008.
Looking back, Morton says it was hard to watch his own cast turn on the film. “They saw what we were going through,” he says. “Most of the actors were sympathetic, but a few of them weren’t. It was uncalled for, but that’s the way it goes.”
Just as I ask Morton what he wishes he could change about “Super Mario Bros.,” his phone starts ringing. “Do you mind? It’s my plumber,” he asks politely, then perks up with an epiphany. “It’s my plumber! What a coincidence. But his name is Mike, not Mario.”
When he comes back into frame on our Zoom call, he begins discussing a pivotal scene at the end of the movie that the producers cut out — one that could have dispelled a lot of the criticism surrounding the film’s loose adaptation of the game.
After Mario and Luigi complete their crazy adventure in Dinohattan, “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,” Morton says. “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.”
While the film has since cultivated a passionate following, Morton says, “We were abandoned by Hollywood after ‘Super Mario Bros.’”
Years later, Morton co-founded the production company MJZ and focused on television commercials. The company has since won the Palme d’Or at Cannes Lions, the festival that celebrates creative communications and advertising, nearly a dozen times. Meanwhile, Jankel directed 24 episodes of the music docuseries “Live From Abbey Road” and helmed the 2018 romantic drama “Tell It to the Bees,” which received a limited theatrical release.
When asked if she has regrets about “Super Mario Bros.,” Jankel says, “Massive regrets! It was such a painful experience. But it’s now become a really joyful experience that has found its place in the annals of history.”
But while critics jumped to declare the film unwatchable, the directors find most of the hatred to be “unjustified.”
While he admits the film is “a mess, structurally,” Morton is quick to point out, “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.”
The director believes the film got swept up in negative cultural attitudes toward video games in the 1990s. “There was a huge outcry in America about how video games were being forced down the throats of our children and polluting our youth,” Morton says. “That they’re not doing their homework and video games are affecting their brains and their diets. These games were viewed as this kind of evil monster.”
He continues, “For Hollywood to say, ‘Now we’re going to turn these video games into movies,’ that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. It opened the floodgates of people’s vitriol against video games. The ‘Super Mario Bros.’ movie was in the front line and took all the flak.”
Now, not only are video games more widely accepted — the gaming industry generates $350 billion annually, dwarfing the revenues of the film, television and music industries — but Hollywood is also starting to stick the landing when it comes to adapting them, from the “Sonic” movie franchise to HBO’s “The Last of Us” series.
Plus, the target audience for “Super Mario Bros.” was kids who were playing the games. Now, those kids have grown up and “have a voice in the cultural zeitgeist,” as Morton points out.
But whether you like it or hate it, Jankel and Morton take “full responsibility” for “Super Mario Bros.”
“At the end of the day, even though there were mitigating circumstances beyond our control, we were ultimately responsible,” Morton says.
Before we wrap up our separate interviews, I ask Morton how the process of making “Super Mario Bros.” affected his marriage with Jankel.
“It was a strain on every aspect of our relationship,” he says. “But our bond was unbreakable, and we survived through it because of that. I don’t know what would have happened if either of us had been on our own. It was really humiliating and nasty. Thank God we did have each other.”
So will they go back to the movie theater to see Universal and Nintendo’s “The Super Mario Bros. Movie”?
“Possibly,” Jankel chuckles. “Having not seen my own movie for so long, I might take a look at it in 30 years.”
