Morton said the problems began after Disney purchased the distribution rights, demanding an extensive rewrite of the screenplay - less effects-heavy, more family-friendly - that arrived 10 days before principal photography began. “You have to admire the huge swings that it took.” For “huge swings,” see, for example, the scene in which Dennis Hopper takes a mud bath with Fiona Shaw.īut even the most ardent fans will admit that “Super Mario Bros.” is kind of a mess. “In an age when we’re inundated with video game and comic book adaptations that take a more literal approach, it’s refreshing to look back at ‘Super Mario Bros.’ 30 years later,” he said. The excessive artistic license taken with the adaptation is part of the fun of it, said Desmond Thorne, a film programmer at Nitehawk. Dismissing that screenplay as too cute, Morton pitched another idea: a darker, grittier Mario Bros. movie script by the “Rain Man” co-writer Barry Morrow. Morton and Jankel’s agent had sent them a Mario Bros. Morton and Jankel were British music video filmmakers who also had been behind the creation of the pseudo-computer-generated TV show host Max Headroom. To Rocky Morton, who directed the movie with Annabel Jankel, that was the point. It looked and felt nothing like the video games. Sticky, elastic fungus plays a key role in the plot. Largely shot in an abandoned cement factory in North Carolina, the movie was mostly set not in the hyper-colored Mushroom Kingdom, but in a grody, dystopian alternate version of New York called Dinohattan, ruled over by the maniacal dictator King Koopa (Dennis Hopper). The live-action “ Super Mario Bros.” starred Bob Hoskins as Mario and John Leguizamo as Luigi, two down-on-their-luck plumber brothers picking up odd jobs in Brooklyn. Way back in 1993, the popularity of Super Mario led to Hollywood’s first big-budget video game adaptation. The mustachioed Nintendo mascot has been on the big screen before - even though some of the people involved would prefer to forget about it. Expect periwinkle skies, green warp pipes and squeaky-voiced, mushroom-headed characters. Movie” recreates the sunny spirit, effervescent action and confectionary aesthetic of the namesake video games, with the voices of Chris Pratt as Mario, Charlie Day as Luigi, Jack Black as Bowser, and Anya Taylor-Joy as Princess Peach. The new animated film “ The Super Mario Bros.

Video game critics