Development Following the release of
Super Mario Bros. (1985), a video game developed and published by
Nintendo, numerous producers attempted to purchase the rights to make a
Super Mario Bros. film. In 1989, Nintendo gave
DIC Entertainment the right to make a film out of
The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!, but it was never produced. In 1990,
Dustin Hoffman attempted to purchase the rights to produce a film with himself as Mario,
Danny DeVito as Luigi, and
Barry Levinson directing. However, this was not made because of scheduling conflicts for DeVito. Jake Eberts purchased the film rights and started developing an adaptation to be directed by
Penny Marshall. Producer
Roland Joffé first came up with the idea of making a live-action adaptation of the video games himself during a script meeting at Eberts' production company Lightmotive. Joffé met
Nintendo of America then-president and
Hiroshi Yamauchi's son-in law,
Minoru Arakawa. He presented Arakawa with an initial draft of the script. One month after their meeting, Joffé traveled to Nintendo's headquarters in Kyoto to pitch the storyline to Yamauchi, which led to Nintendo receiving interest in the project. Joffé left with a $2 million contract giving the temporary control of the Mario character to Joffé. Nintendo retained merchandising rights through a "creative partnership" with Lightmotive. When Yamauchi asked Joffé why Nintendo should sell the rights to Lightmotive over a major company, Joffé assured them that Nintendo would have more control over the film. However, Nintendo had no interest in creative control and believed the
Mario brand was strong enough to allow an experiment with an outside industry. Joffé said, "I think they looked at the movie as some sort of strange creature that was kind of rather intriguing to see if we could walk or not."
Writing The first screenplay was written by Oscar-winning screenwriter
Barry Morrow. His story followed brothers Mario and Luigi on an existential road trip so similar to Morrow's prior
Rain Man (1988) that production titled the script "
Drain Man". Morrow described his screenplay as "a study in contrast, like
Laurel and Hardy or
Abbott and Costello", that would have "an odyssey and a quest" like the game itself. Co-producer Fred Caruso later said that Morrow's story was "more of a serious drama piece as opposed to a fun comedy". The writing team of
Jim Jennewein and Tom S. Parker were brought on next to write a more traditional adaptation. Jennewein said, "So right away we knew that the best way to do this is to essentially have a journey into this world, not unlike
The Wizard of Oz." His and Parker's take on the story was to subvert and satirize fairy tale clichés, and to focus on the relationship between Mario and Luigi. Jennewein said, "Essentially what we did was what
Shrek did [...] And we knew the story had to be about the brothers and that the emotional through-line would be about the brothers."
Greg Beeman of
License to Drive (1988) was attached to direct and development had already moved into pre-production, but the failure of Beeman's recent
Mom and Dad Save the World (1992) led to his dismissal by nervous producers. Joffé said, "We tried some various avenues that didn't work, that came up too medieval or somehow wasn't the right thing. I felt the project was taking a wrong turn [...] And that's when I began thinking of
Max Headroom." Joffé traveled to Rome to meet with creators
Rocky Morton and
Annabel Jankel. that tells the "true story" behind Nintendo's inspiration. Screenwriter Parker Bennett elaborated: "Our take on it was that Nintendo interpreted the events from our story and came up with the video game. We basically worked backwards." The concept of a parallel universe inhabited by dinosaurs was inspired by Dinosaur Land from the recently released
Super Mario World (1990). Jankel envisioned the parallel dimension as "a whole world with a reptile point-of-view, dominated by aggressive, primordial behavior and basic instincts", while Morton considered the ecological and technological consequences of a dinosaur society that holds fossil fuels sacred. Rowe returned home to work on another project, but Solomon remained for several weeks to provide additional rewrites. Without invitation, Bennett and Runté traveled to Wilmington and immediately returned to the project. They would remain through production to provide final rewrites, dialogue for
ADR, and the dialogue for the expository animated dinosaur opening. The intelligent fungus was inspired by both the
Mushroom Kingdom from the games and tabloid reports of a discovered gigantic fungus.
Casting After securing the film rights, Lightmotive began the casting for the characters. Hoffman continued to express interest in portraying Mario. However, Arakawa did not believe that he was right for the role. DeVito was offered both the role of Mario and director.
Arnold Schwarzenegger and
Michael Keaton were approached to play Koopa, but both turned down the role. Actors
Bob Hoskins and
John Leguizamo were ultimately cast as Mario and Luigi. Initially, Hoskins disliked the script and did not want to do another children's film: "I'd done
Roger Rabbit. I'd done
Hook. I didn't want to become like
Dick Van Dyke." Jankel said, "John was a brilliant up and coming stand-up comic and actor [...] We went to see him at Second City, and we were 100% sold. He had a wonderful combination of empathy and irreverence but was entirely without guile. It was not specifically scripted to be cast with a Hispanic or Latino actor, but it made perfect sense that the Mario Bros. themselves should be this contemporary unconventional family, so the small unit of just two, couldn't be pegged as one thing or another."
Filming Several weeks before filming began, the
Walt Disney Studios acquired the film rights and was to produce it under its film division
Hollywood Pictures. After Disney requested rewrites of the script, Morton said the final result was a script that was not at all like the script that he, Jankel, and the cast had signed on to film, and that the tone of the new script was not at all compatible with the sets, which had already been built. Solomon recalled that he "felt like [his draft of the screenplay] was at least coherent," but upon visiting the set, [Morton] had cut it up with a bunch of other stuff he liked from other drafts and a bunch of new stuff. [...] There was no through line." Leguizamo said, "It's eight-year-olds who play the game and that's where the movie needed to be aimed. [...] But [the directors] kept trying to insert new material. They shot scenes with strippers and with other sexually-explicit content, which all got edited out anyway."
Richard Edson said that he and co-star
Fisher Stevens were permitted to contribute their own dialogue at the writers' approval: "If we could improve the script, they were more than happy. So we did our own [dialogue] and they loved it [...] that made it a lot more fun for us." It was filmed at Carolco Studios in
Wilmington, North Carolina. Morton said, "I was locked out of the editing room [...] I had to get the
DGA to come and help me get back into the editing room. I tried to get the editor to cut it digitally, but they refused. They wanted to edit on
Moviola and
Steenbeck machines, so the process was laboriously slow, which didn't help us get the special effect cut in on time." Initially, the film's ending had Mario and Luigi returning to
Brooklyn, New York, and the scene was filmed, but the producers cut it out; Morton later said that the initial ending would have saved the film.
Production design Production Designer
David Snyder approached turning the
Mushroom Kingdom into the live-action setting of Dinohattan (which was first given the tentative names "DinoYawk" and "Koopaville") by "[taking] all the elements that are in the video game" and "[turning] them into a metaphor and [combining] them with 3-D and real characters". Art Director Walter P. Martishius said, "Koopa gets a single glimpse of Manhattan at the beginning of the movie". This inspires Koopa to recreate Dinohattan, but "he didn't get it quite right. The place is twisted, off balance, different. And he doesn't even know it." Originally, the Goombas were only background characters, but their final designs were so impressive that directors Morton and Jankel promoted them to main characters with major stunts. The film was also the first to be scanned with the
Kodak Cineon film scanner to create a digital intermediate, allowing for the compositing of more than 700 visual effects shots. The team consisted of both traditional
rotoscope artists and digital artists, comprising approximately 30 people in total.
Technicolor provided visual effects
dailies for the team, scanning the shots back onto film with the effects integrated. The disintegration effect for the inter-dimensional merge was inspired by the
transporter from
Star Trek. The film was shortlisted at the
66th Academy Awards for
Best Visual Effects, but it was ultimately not nominated. ==Reception==