How Super Mario Bros. Went Awry

The $2 million deal for producer Roland Joffe to bring the video game Super Mario Bros. to the big screen was after he sent packages of tea to Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi. It was a seemingly pleasant start to a film now branded by The Guardian as "the Heaven's Gate of video game movies."

Joffe -- an Oscar-nominated director whose credits include The Killing Fields, The Mission, Fat Man and Little Boy and the more recent horror film Captivity -- recalls that Nintendo signed away creative control over the project to the filmmakers, even when he promised them that they were not going to make it "a sweet, little lovey-dovey story."

Max Headroom's Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel were brought aboard to direct Super Mario Bros., creating a dark world full of fetishes and freaks. Potential distributors balked when they saw what was in store and no one signed up to distribute the movie. So the powers-that-be ordered a hurried 10-day rewrite. "[The producers] changed the material to accommodate the comments that were coming back from the studios, which was: this was supposed to be a kids' movie," said Morton.


The cast and directors flipped out when the new script was delivered, a draft which won over Disney-owned distributor Hollywood Pictures. "We thought, maybe as we're shooting we can steer it and make it into the film we wanted," recalled Morton. "We were wrong: we were unable to do that and it became a huge mess."

Poor Morton sounds like someone living down a dark past rather than just a filmmaker who made a bomb: "To this day people say: 'You did Super Mario Bros? Oh God … ' It was 20 years ago, but it's still there. What can you do?"

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