The whole world is raving about the new Super Mario Bros. movie, which inevitably leads to comparisons with the horribly flopped adaptation from 1993. John Leguizamo, who played Luigi back then, revealed a spicy detail from the original that the colorful animated film cannot keep up with.
What’s the deal with the old adaptation? Super Mario Bros. was the first live-action adaptation based on a video game in 1993. Nintendo gave directors Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel free rein in the production, so great was the trust in Mario as a brand.
The result was a surprisingly dark film that turned Mario and Luigi into struggling plumbers with financial concerns. The film was a failure both with critics and audiences, making just 39 million dollars of its budget of 42 to 48 million dollars.
However, Super Mario Bros. has now achieved a kind of cult status among some viewers. These fans will likely be pleased to hear that the original vision of the directors was even darker.
Too dark for Disney
What was the problem with the original? In a video interview with the men’s magazine GQ, John Leguizamo spoke about his career and the 1993 adaptation. The now 62-year-old revealed that Disney, who secured the distribution rights, were not in agreement with the directors’ dark vision.
Because while Morton and Jankel wanted to tell an adult and feminist story in the Mario universe, the producers were concerned that they were straying too far from the target audience of young adults and families.
There were a lot of disagreements, Leguizamo remembers. He particularly points out a scene in the film that took place in the nightclub “Boom Boom Bar”: Those were all “strippers from North Carolina,” where the film was shot.
This party scene? Those were all strippers from North Carolina, who they brought to the set and dressed in the boldest clothes and costumes. Disney was not happy. They had to cut a lot of it out, CGI it, whatever bad technology they had back then.
Perhaps it was these creative differences that ultimately led to the film’s failure. However, Leguizamo himself emphasizes how grateful he is to the directors for casting him as a Latino, which was a big deal at the time.
Knownly, Leguizamo is not a big fan of the new Mario movie. The actor has already criticized the lack of diversity in the cast and the casting of the voices of Mario and Luigi with white men (via 3D Juegos).
Since 1993, there have been many attempts to adapt video games for film and television. Series like The Witcher, League of Legends, and Last of Us are very popular. If you want to know how the series fared among you, the readers of MeinMMO, you can find the results of our poll here:
