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Despite his impeccable gaming career, the road to Hollywood stardom has been adifficult one for everyone’s favorite portly plumber, Mario. The 1993 adaptation was a criticaland financial failure so massive that it seemingly cursed all future video game movies and scaredNintendo away from trying again for multiple decades. But that arduous journey has finallyreached its conclusion. 2023’sThe Super Mario Bros. Moviehas hit theaters and become a bighit with audiences almost immediately. So, what changed in the thirty years betweenadaptations? In my opinion, it all comes down to how the filmmakers viewed and approached thesource material.
WhenSuper Mario Bros. (1993)originally hit theaters, it was literally thefirsttime any filmhad been adapted from a video game. Video games as a medium had only existed for just overthirty years and had only been popular with consumers for around twenty. As such, it was andstill is an extremely young artistic medium and Hollywood found itself scrambling to figure outwhat to do with it. In the most generous reading, Hollywood initially treated video games as ablank canvas rather than a storytelling source in its own right like books.
Also Read:Is Super Mario Bros. (1993) Better Than You Remember?
This is seen veryprominently seen in the live-actionSuper Mario Bros. using the character names and some of thebasic backstory as a launching point for an almost entirely different sci-fi story involvingalternate dimensions and human/dinosaur hybrids. And part of why that film is the way it iscomes down to it being so early in regard to approaching the medium. Everyone knew videogames were popular, everyone knew they had beloved characters, everyoneknewthey couldmake something out of them; however, no one knew how to make it. Which is why films likeSuper MarioBros. (1993), the originalStreet FighterandDouble Dragonmovies, 1995’sMortal Kombatandso on kept being made despite continuous failure. If at first you don’t succeed, try again untilsomething sticks.
By contrast,The Super Mario Bros. Movie(2023) is coming out in a very different era.Video games have been around for much longer. Many filmmakers working today grew up withthem, and through rigorous trial and error it seems as though Hollywood has landed on an idealway of adapting them. Rather than try to do a straight narrative adaptation like books or use theproperty as a launchpad for something else entirely, the most successful adaptations take theframework, characters, spirit, and at least some of the plot (if applicable) and translate them intoan appropriate cinematic language.Detective Pikachutranslated the exploratory nature ofPokémon into a compelling detective story as both involve navigating a complex world.Arcaneused pre-establishedLeague of Legendslore to create a compelling character drama in its ownright, and now we haveThe Super Mario Bros. Movietakes the existing worlds, characters, andpowers from various Mario games and translates them into a fantasy adventure story.
Also Read:The Super Mario Bros. Movie Review – Nintendo Fun for the Whole Family
ThoughThe Super Mario Bros. Moviedoes open oddly similarly to its 1993 predecessor with Mario and Luigi as struggling Brooklyn plumbers who stumble across a portal to another dimension, the film quickly diverges from there. The worlds seen in the 2023 film are vibrant, colorful, fantastical and varied, as apposed to the grimy cityscape seen in the 1993 film. Almost every character from the 1993 film looks unrecognizable to their game counterpart, whereas the 2023 characters often look like they came straight from the games. The 1993 film only had Mario, Luigi, Toad, Goombas, King Koopa, Daisy and Yoshi. And while the 2023 film doesn’t have a main Yoshi and swaps out Daisy for Peach, it also features Cranky Kong, Donkey Kong, Kamek, and a whole lot of various Mario enemies. Why? Because the filmmakers behindThe Super Mario Bros. Moviewere invested in the source material.
On top of its game-accurate designs and its plethora of references and Easter eggs to thelarger Mario franchise, it’s clear that directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic love Marioand put genuine thought into how best to bring that world to the screen. This, to me, is the secretweapon that has allowed more recent video game adaptations to succeed after so many othershave failed. Properly adapting a world rather than one specific game’s plot. Most video gameseither have too much or too little story to work as traditional narrative films or even TV shows,so the best possible solution is to bring the feeling of playing the game to the screen. And that isonly possible because people working in Hollywood want it to happen.
The mentality that cursed us with the deluge of terrible video game movies in the 90s and early 2000s was one that attempted to use the increasing popularity of the medium as either a springboard for unrelated concepts like with the live-action Mario movie or the firstResident Evil; or attempt to fit a square peg into a round hole by adapting video games the same way you would adapt books like withMortal Kombat. And that’s because Hollywood didn’t understand video games at the time and arguably didn’t want to. They were just another popular trend to be exploited for profit. But now, we have filmmakers who see the value in video games. Who look at the worlds they create and the ideas they inspire and see how they could make great films.
It took a long time for the industry to get here, but leave it to the lovable goof of a plumber that is Mario to both get us into this mess and get us out of it.
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Joshua Ryan
Lead Film & TV Critics Editor
Articles Published :322
Born and raised in Central Florida, Joshua Ryan has harbored a love for cinema since the earliest years of his childhood. Through endless hours of watching Turner Classic Movies, especially the works of Alfred Hitchcock, his passion for film and film criticism grew. As an adult, he channeled that passion into a career as the editor and lead critic of FandomWire’s film and television department.
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