Everyone is raving about the new Super Mario Bros. movie, which inevitably leads to comparisons with the badly flopped 1993 film adaptation. John Leguizamo, who played Luigi at the time, now revealed a piquant detail from the original that the motley animated film can’t keep up with.
What’s up with the old film? Super Mario Bros. was the first live-action film adaptation based on a video game in 1993. Nintendo had given the directing couple Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel a free hand in the implementation, so great was their trust in Mario as a brand.
The result was a surprisingly dark film that turned Mario and Luigi into financially troubled plumbers. The film was a flop with both critics and viewers, grossing just $39 million of its $42-48 million budget.
In the meantime, however, Super Mario Bros. has reached a kind of cult status with some viewers. Those fans will be happy to know that the directors’ original vision was even darker.
First trailer for the “Super Mario” movie – made entirely of CGI
Too dark for Disney
What was the original’s problem? In a video interview with men’s magazine GQ, John Leguizamo spoke about his career and the 1993 film adaptation. The 62-year-old revealed that Disney, who had secured the distribution rights, did not agree with the directors’ bleak vision .
Because while Morton and Jankel wanted to tell an adult and feminist story in the Mario universe, the producers were concerned that it would stray too far from the target group of young adults and families.
There were a lot of discrepancies, Leguizamo recalls. In particular, he points to a scene in the film that took place at the Boom Boom Bar nightclub: They were all “strippers from North Carolina,” where the film was shot.
That party scene? These were all strippers from North Carolina who brought them onto the set and put them in the most revealing clothes and costumes. Disney wasn’t happy. They had to cut out a lot of it, edit it with CGI, whatever bad technology they had at the time.
Perhaps it was these creative differences that ultimately caused the film to fail. However, Leguizamo himself emphasizes how grateful he is to the directors for having cast him as a Latin American in a leading role, which was a big deal at the time.
Leguizamo is notoriously not a huge fan of the new Mario movie. The actor has previously criticized the lack of cast diversity and the fact that white males are used to voice Mario and Luigi (via 3D Juegos).
Since 1993 there have been many attempts to adapt video games for film and television. Series on The Witcher, League of Legends and Last of Us enjoy great popularity. If you want to know how the series did for you, the readers of MeinMMO, you can find the results of our poll here:
Video Game TV Series Ranking: From Unpopular to Popular – Where Do Arcane, The Witcher, and Last of Us Stand?