The bizarre first attempt at a Mario movie
Hope you enjoyed the non-stop parade of superhero movies for the past two and a half decades, because we’re diving headfirst into the next generation of blockbusters now. One summed up by the gormless, Chris Pratt-voiced iteration of Super Mario. Or Mario Mario for those in the know.
Yes, we’ve moved from dressing up any old dolt in a cape and cowl and having them fly around a pillar of CGI light to slapping any old dolt in a recording studio and having them slur out gaming catchphrases. This is because the next step in the descent of major Hollywood filmmaking into a corporate, IP-soaked hellscape is a few decades of video game adaptations. What’s more, if the billions raked in by the two Mario movies are anything to go by, the more they’re slavish, soulless recreations of things we’ve already seen on our consoles countless times, the better.
The Legend of Zelda seems to be next. As does a Yoshi movie. The recent Mario movie featured a cameo from a Glen Powell-voiced Fox McCloud, and one can imagine that all this is building up to a Super Smash Bros movie that everyone involved in the Mario movies is strenuously denying they’re making. Then you consider that PlayStation might have actually got involved in all this first with the critical and commercial smash that was The Last of Us, and realise that we really are living in the future already.
All of these projects, even the good ones like (season one of) The Last of Us, are pretty faithful recreations of the games. While we do like to see things that we recognise and already know, there’s a pretty compelling argument to be made that video game adaptations should differ from the original source material. After all, video games are an interactive medium, and movies are not. They should be different experiences; otherwise, you’re just left with, essentially, watching a ludicrously expensive play-through of a Mario game.
But then, we know what happens when video game adaptations don’t look like the source material, don’t we?
Why did the first Mario movie look like that?!
If you’re at all of the nerdy persuasion (and if you’re on this website and think you’re not, I’ve got bad news for you), you’re almost certainly aware of the 1993 catastrophe Super Mario Bros, the first attempt to bring everyone’s favourite plumber to the big screen. You almost certainly know that the only thing that it shares with the games is the likenesses of its two main characters, a few of the character names and literally nothing else. You almost certainly know that it looks more like some unholy mix of Terry Gillian’s Brazil and an ABC sitcom Dinosaurs than any actual Mario game.
What you might not know is exactly why it looks like that. The truth is that in the early 1990s, the movie industry was a very different place from what it is now. Put simply, it was the pinnacle of pop culture and carried itself as such. When a property was adapted into films, the source material was often seen as something that needed to be changed to become a movie. One can see this when novels and TV shows were adapted, but especially in the early attempts at comic book movie adaptations.
Tim Burton’s Batman pictures take enormous liberties with the source material, as did the movie versions of The Crow and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Comics had decades of history and were still looked down on as kiddie bullshit at the time, so you can imagine just how little respect a video game would have commanded a mere ten years after the medium came to prominence. Take any interview with the creative team behind the 1993 Super Mario Bros and you’ll find people who fundamentally didn’t want to make a Mario movie. They wanted to make a dark, industrial action blockbuster in the vein of Mad Max and Blade Runner.
Because of that, the movie sure is at least an interesting failure – contrast that to the 2023 movie, which is the complete opposite, a boring success, it’s easy to say, in that case, that the 1993 movie is good because it’s weird and dark and strange, and the 2023 movie is bad because it’s just a Mario game without a controller… To me, they’re a lot more similar than they seem on the surface because they both get the attitude towards the source material wrong.
The 1993 movie has no respect for the source material at all. No adaptation of anything will ever be good if the creator fundamentally doesn’t like the story or the characters, just look at any time Zack Snyder ever tried to make a Superman story. The answer to that isn’t just slavish devotion to the source material, though. Jettisoning any creativity in favour of copy and pasting the original on screen. Neither of them has genuine respect for the source material, really.
I’m sure we’ll get a genuinely good video game adaptation movie sometime soon. If only because the broken clock rule never fails, and there’s about to be shitloads of them coming in the near future. However, that won’t come from either jettisoning the source material or pandering to it, but somewhere in the middle.