I shouldn’t be talking about the 1993 Super Mario Bros. movie right now. In fact, I’m kind of sorry for even bringing it up. It’s 2026, Nintendo is firmly in a new era of cinematic adaptations of their popular video games, a second animated Super Mario Bros. movie is about to launch (which will almost certainly be a wildly successful product like the first), and a big-budget, live-action Zelda movie is in production as we speak. Dredging up an ancient Nintendo movie failure – one that is a thoroughly beaten Yoshi-shaped horse by now – feels both cruel and irresponsible, like being at your friend’s wedding and telling everyone about the time he threw up in front of the entire class in middle school. Everyone should have moved on by now.
But sometimes it’s important to think about where someone started so you can reflect on how far they’ve come, and video game movies have mostly improved since the live-action Super Mario Bros. movie was released to poor reviews, a very muted box office reception, and a lot of confused fans (with even more confused parents) over 30 years ago.
But hey, let’s start with some positives. Despite so much of Super Mario Bros. being a baffling interpretation of the source material, Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo’s take on real-life Mario and Luigi going on an interdimensional road trip/rescue mission actually works. Their banter is frequently charismatic, endearing, and fun, even if it’s mostly quips and catchphrases as hallucinatory nonsense unravels around them. They’ve got great chemistry and they’re believable as two Italian American brothers bickering and bantering as they attempt to run a failing, family-owned Brooklyn plumbing business out of a van that barely works. (And that’s even before they get pulled into an alternate universe and everything goes crazy.) If that setup sounds familiar, it’s because it’s essentially the same in the far more successful 2023 animated The Super Mario Bros. Movie – an interesting coincidence considering plumbing companies and broken-down utility vehicles aren’t ever really explored in the video games.
It’s a good thing that the dynamic between Mario and Luigi functions as well as it does since nearly everything around them increasingly seems to get more insane, bizarre, and distant from the source material. Super Mario Bros. plays out like someone quickly read the back of the box of a Super Mario game and cobbled together something that attempts to fill in the narrative blanks with total nonsense, wrapped in set pieces that mix the gritty New York street culture of the first live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie with Blade Runner’s dystopian future — none of which really makes any sense for Super Mario. Fantastical and psychotic things either happen as if they’re totally normal and commonplace, or they’re explained literally and in excruciating detail, a balance perfectly encapsulated by the film’s opening minutes where a voiceover gives us the history of the dinosaurs, followed by a flashback to a group of nuns receiving an orphaned egg… that hatches into a human girl. Why? No one knows, but it’s possibly because one of the writers saw a picture of Daisy and another picture of Yoshi and decided they should be the same species.
It’s a good thing that the dynamic between Mario and Luigi functions as well as it does since nearly everything around them increasingly seems to get more insane, bizarre, and distant from the source material.
This is technically a movie review, so I am now going to attempt to explain the plot. Deep breath: Two brothers living in Brooklyn meet a woman whose job it is to dig up dinosaur bones under the Brooklyn Bridge, because obviously that’s where the most dinosaur bones are, and because the engineers who build bridges somehow didn’t find them despite there being so many bones down there. And also they have no problem with people digging for dinosaur bones under functional bridges because that seems safe and fine for everyone involved. The woman gets kidnapped by two vaguely Italian guys from another dimension and the two slightly less vaguely Italian brothers fall through a magical illusory wall to find her, landing themselves in a manic lizard-themed version of Manhattan where everything is covered in wet webs. From there, a villain leader who orders fast food using a gun pointed at his television makes everyone’s life slightly difficult because he wants the woman’s necklace, and he also does evolution experiments on his employees, which they all seem OK with. The brothers then have to save the woman, defeat the villain, and learn several things about dinosaurs that aren’t applicable to reality.
As the poster describes, this ain’t no game. It is also frequently barely a movie, more a byproduct of the sheer disdain that movie executives frequently have for films aimed at children, treating the audience like passive lab rats who will just consume whatever is dumped into the feeding tubes. Kids deserved and continue to deserve better. That said, Super Mario Bros. is occasionally a fun time for a kids movie despite the fact that dozens and dozens of its moments are completely unrecognizable as a Super Mario Bros. movie. It’s fast-paced, sometimes funny, and has likeable protagonists taking on a big, campy bad guy (played by none other than Dennis Hopper).
It’s also got lots of stuff that kids thought was cool in the early ’90s, like tyrannosaurs, big vehicles with unnecessary stuff glued on them like they’re from an action-figure line, fireball guns, a zipline, and… prostitutes? More importantly though, it had the benefit of being one of the earliest live-action video game movies ever made, which means audiences didn’t exactly have a strong point of reference for how these things should turn out (and also hadn’t yet suffered through the somehow even worse Double Dragon movie which was released a year later). Watching the Super Mario Bros. movie is sort of like eating a knockoff version of your favorite breakfast cereal. Yes, it has marshmallows and fun oat shapes and a silly character on the packaging, but it all just tastes so fucking weird. These aren’t General Mills Lucky Charms, they’re First Street Magic Shapes where the leprechaun mascot is replaced with a clipart blue dinosaur and an off-putting saccharine paste slowly builds up on the roof of your mouth the longer you spend consuming it.
I don’t hate this movie. I swear. In fact, I try to revisit it every few years and see if there are any redeeming qualities to it. It’s all just so profoundly strange, which – while that’s a more ambitious and occasionally interesting thing for a movie to be than “safe” – does make me wonder what percentage of people in the credits had ever actually played the game. Imagine if me and 200 dogs recorded a song about being astronauts. The end result would be equal parts fascinating and horrible, but real astronauts would sit around for decades wondering why the dogs and I ever thought we were qualified to tell their story. It’s possible that there were actually some people involved in making Super Mario Bros. who had played the games before, but they either never spoke up or were completely ignored, two entirely plausible scenarios for a movie that went both over schedule and over budget and, by all accounts, had a frequently contentious set.
There are nitpicky things to get annoyed about because they seem like the easiest details to get right from the games. Just basic stuff that anyone who had actually played a Mario game could have flagged. Why is Mario wearing yellow for a third of the film? Why is Luigi (who didn’t even bother growing a mustache or gluing one on) wearing red for two thirds of the film? Why are the power-up mushrooms replaced with a disgusting ceiling fungus that turns into a man? Why does Toad play guitar? Wait, the guitar guy was supposed to Toad? Just some of the many things to think about as the film flashes through its 104 minutes of run time at both a breakneck speed and an eternity, like that looping gif of the speeding vehicle that keeps looking like it’s about to crash into a wall but never actually does. And if 104 minutes seems like a long time, it’s actually nothing in comparison to the 30 years that it took to see another Super Mario movie in theaters after the 1993 one did nearly irreparable damage to Nintendo’s relationship with Hollywood.
The Highest-Grossing Video Game Movie Adaptations
The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023): $1,360,879,735A Minecraft Movie (2025): $961,187,780Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (2024): $492,162,604Pokémon Detective Pikachu (2019): $450,063,166Warcraft (2016): $439,048,914
*All worldwide grosses via Box Office Mojo
Did Mario fans deserve a better live-action Mario movie at the time? Probably, but it’s hard to imagine what that would’ve looked like in even the most capable hands. We had The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!, a weekly series where two real adults in colorful Mario Bros. outfits introduced fun and silly Mario cartoons – all of which felt a lot more connected to the world established in the video games – so even back then, walking out of the theater after watching the live-action Super Mario Bros. movie had us feeling in our guts that something was off.
The 1989 Batman and 1990 Ninja Turtles movies successfully saw those characters make the jump to the big screen from cartoons and comics. The directors of these films used modest practical effects, physical sets, and a little thing called restraint to expertly pick and choose which elements to carry over from the source material to the big screen, resulting in two classic adaptations that fans still adore today.
This is very much not the case for the Super Mario Bros. movie, which sought to adapt games that were set in the completely fantastical and surreal Mushroom Kingdom, a place where turtles can fly, clouds can kill you with spike balls, and anthropomorphic bullets hover above you as you race to scale a large flagpole. No amount of time, money, or dedicated fandom could have nailed that world perfectly in 1993, or even in 2026, seeing as there hasn’t been an attempt at a live-action Super Mario Bros. movie since.
That’s not to give this messy film a free pass, however. Just because “let’s make a live-action Super Mario movie” is an inherently flawed premise today, or any other day in history, doesn’t excuse the dozens and dozens of completely unhinged and demented decisions that the 1993 movie makes with overwhelming confidence every three seconds, right down to the final scene where it has the audacity to end on a cliffhanger meant to be resolved in a sequel that no sane business man on Earth would ever greenlight. Not only did it never get a second film but you can’t even buy, rent, or stream Super Mario Bros. digitally by any legal means these days, presumably because Nintendo would rather have their recent Illumination animated movie of nearly the exact same name dominate your search results instead.
