![]() ![]() Bill White, who handled Nintendo’s North American promotions, met with Hoffman and let him down easy - the game execs wanted Danny DeVito, who was, to quote Sheff, “as close to a dead ringer for Mario as Hollywood had to offer.” DeVito apparently entertained talks, but ultimately chose to concentrate on directing and co-starring in Hoffa. The modern-day equivalent would be, like, Michael Haneke setting up a shingle to develop reality TV.ĭustin Hoffman, who had just won an Oscar for Rain Man, was the first star to put his hat in the ring to star as Mario his kids were, as David Sheff puts it in his book Game Over: Press Start to Continue, “Nintendo maniacs,” and the Oscar winner apparently wanted to bring their 8-bit hero to life to impress them. in part to establish a different image for Lightmotive from the heavyweight fare he makes as a director.” In other words, Joffe - who in the previous decade had been nominated for two Best Director Oscars and won the Palme d’Or at Cannes - was pretty openly looking for a cash cow. According to Variety, Joffe “never planned to direct, but wanted to Super Mario Bros. In September 1990, Lightmotive, the personal production company of The Killing Fields director Roland Joffe, struck a deal with Nintendo to produce a Mario movie in what company president Ben Myron called a “very competitive situation - all the studios wanted the rights.” Lightmotive won out because they proposed having the film function as a prequel to the game, as the first step in a call-and-response scenario in which movies and game releases would dramatize alternating chapters in the same story. By 1990, Nintendo was well on its way to selling nearly 62 million NESs, about half of them in North America - enough to convince a film industry high on recent crossover kids’ hits like Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Home Alone, and particularly Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - which was the fifth-highest grossing film of 1990 - that video games were the next source-material gold mine. ![]() The first Super Mario Brothers game, a vague sequel to the non-super 1983 arcade game Mario Brothers, was bundled with most Nintendo Entertainment System units on its North American debut in 1985. Reading the breathless coverage given to the film in the Hollywood papers, starting in the rumor stages and continuing through its spectacular belly flop, you can almost see an alternate universe in which this could’ve been the big hit of summer 1993 instead of that other dino-studded effects spectacular, a world in which the summer blockbuster as we currently know it might have taken a similarly warped path of evolution. The movie’s plot - to the extent that any lucid story line is discernible in a film cobbled together from drafts worked on by at least nine writers - conjures an alternate universe in which humans descended not from primates, but from dinosaurs. As an unmitigated disaster, Super Mario is both emblematic of its time and troublingly anticipatory of the worst of our own time. When the dust settled, Super Mario grossed more than $20 million, on a reported (usually code for underreported) production budget of $50 million. Mirror Mirror Capote and the Other Truman Capote Movie).īut Mario had other problems: The production was a disorganized nightmare that saw the press swiftly transition from rapturously enthusiastic to downright vicious - and, worst of all, the audience didn’t seem to care. Released two weeks before Jurassic Park, it’s possible that Super Mario - which, like Steven Spielberg’s movie, featured well-respected actors engaging with state-of-the-art CGI and a plot dealing with evolution and dinosaurs - would have fallen victim to the zero-sum economics that usually creates a winner and a loser out of two films made around the same time about the same thing (see: Snow White and the Huntsman vs. The first feature film based directly on a video game - a feat of adaptation that, arguably, Hollywood is still a long way away from figuring out how to perfect. Directed by Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel (creators of Max Headroom) starring Bob Hoskins, John Leguizamo, and Dennis Hopper. Super Mario Bros., theatrically released May 28, 1993. By digging up some of these misbegotten artifacts and examining them both within the context of their eras and in the cold light of the present, we’ll try to understand how seemingly inexplicable disasters happen. You can learn a lot about the way the movie industry works in a given moment by looking at its successes (whether accidental or engineered), but often you can learn even more by looking at its failures - the long-in-development projects that never make it to the screen, the labors of love gone wrong, the should’ve-been blockbusters that fail to land - particularly those that caught Hollywood by surprise, miscalculations that everyone involved has attempted to sweep under the rug.
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