Super Mario Bros. is much darker in tone and appearance than The Super Mario Bros. Movie of 2023 — and it’s a far more gutsy, memorable adaptation of the games’ silly premise. It’s a lot more fun to watch as a result, even today.
The Super Mario Bros. Movie is a pitch straight down the middle of the plate. It’s uncomplicated, breezy, and risk-free. It’s the exact kind of Mario origin story that you’d expect to see after the disastrous critical reception to the 1993 live-action movie Super Mario Bros. — and for all of those reasons, it’s pretty boring.
It has nothing on the grandiosity of 1993’s Super Mario Bros., a movie that infuriated its stars and cinema audiences with its bizarre creative decisions. Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo, who played Mario and Luigi respectively in the film, drank whiskey between takes to cope with the production’s chaotic set, which may have led to Hoskins’ repeated injuries while filming. In 2007, Hoskins told The Guardian that Super Mario Bros. was “the worst thing I ever did… 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.”
It’s obviously for the best that the Super Mario Bros. set environment wasn’t replicated in the making of the 2023 animated film. (At least as far as we know.) But the overcorrection in the other direction led to a film that lacks any sense of spontaneity, creativity, or narrative risk. The Super Mario Bros. Movie is so by-the-books that you could easily predict the entire plot just from the trailers alone. If anything, the plot you’d predict would probably have more twists and turns than the actual movie.
But Maddy, you might be thinking, isn’t The Super Mario Bros. Movie for kids? It doesn’t need to be complicated. Sure, I take your point. One of the big criticisms of the 1993 Mario movie is that it isn’t very kid-friendly, unless you’re a kid who likes gross, dark sci-fi. In Super Mario Bros., the Mushroom Kingdom gets reimagined as Dinohattan, a cyberpunk dystopia in an alternate universe populated by dinosaur-human hybrids ruled by the cruel tyrant King Koopa (Dennis Hopper). In addition to kidnapping human women from our universe’s version of Manhattan, in search of the long-lost Princess Daisy, King Koopa also has a terrifying “de-evolution” device that can transform any living being into some primordial version of themselves.
