The encyclopedia · Product & Design · Product decision · 1993
Hollywood's first video-game movie swapped the Mushroom Kingdom for a dystopia
The 1993 Super Mario Bros. adaptation ditched the Mushroom Kingdom for a gritty parallel-dimension city, cost $48M+, and made back only $38.9M.
Nintendo · Disney · 1993-05-28
What happened
Producers acquired the film rights to Nintendo's Super Mario Bros. games and greenlit a live-action adaptation, but the directors and writers discarded the games' colorful fantasy setting for an original dystopian parallel-dimension city, betting audiences would follow the characters into a world unrecognizable from the source material.
Production was troubled throughout, with directors reportedly clashing with the cast and rewriting large portions of the script during filming, pushing the budget from an original estimate closer to $48 million and, by some accounts, as high as $60 million once reshoots and overruns are counted.
The film opened to negative reviews and box office of $38.9 million worldwide, well short of covering its costs. It remains widely cited as one of the first cautionary examples in video-game film adaptation, though it briefly held the title of highest-grossing video-game movie by default, since no rival adaptation yet existed.
Why it happened
- Studios approved a script that abandoned the game's core setting without testing whether fans would accept the substitute.
- Director-cast conflict during filming led to constant rewrites, signaling the production lacked a stable creative vision.
- Nobody capped the budget as reshoots and overruns pushed spending well past the original plan.
- The film's marketing traded on the Mario name while delivering a story with little connection to what made the games popular.
The lesson
Licensing a beloved property doesn't buy permission to discard the parts of it that made people love it.
Aftermath
The film became a byword in the games industry for how not to adapt a game, and Nintendo kept film rights close for decades afterward before eventually returning with The Super Mario Bros. Movie in 2023, made with direct creative involvement from the games' original creator.
Sources
- Super Mario Bros. (film) — Wikipedia
- ScreenRant — How Much Profit The Super Mario Bros. Movie Made At The Box Office
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