Super Mario Bros. and the Krull Question
The 1993 Super Mario Bros. film was a commercial failure that slowly became a cult curiosity, a path well worn by the ambitious fantasy flops of the decade before it.
It is worth remembering how strange an idea this was in the early 1990s. Mario was the most recognisable character in video games, but nobody had yet made a major live-action Hollywood film out of a game, and there was no template for how to do it. The producers hired Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel, the duo behind the cyberpunk television character Max Headroom, and cast Bob Hoskins as Mario, John Leguizamo as Luigi and Dennis Hopper as King Koopa.
Not the Mushroom Kingdom
Instead of bright pipes and floating blocks, the film imagines a parallel dimension where dinosaurs survived and evolved into people. Its city is a grimy, fungus-choked dystopia ruled by Koopa. Goombas are towering, tiny-headed henchmen; Yoshi is a small, realistic dinosaur puppet. The Brooklyn plumbers are drawn in through a rift to rescue Daisy, played by Samantha Mathis, who turns out to have royal roots on the other side.
The production was reportedly difficult, with the script rewritten repeatedly as filming went on, and the result feels like several different films competing for space. It was poorly reviewed and failed at the box office, and for years it was the standard example of how not to adapt a video game.
The Krull comparison
That arc, from expensive misfire to fond cult object, is familiar from the 1980s. Peter Yates’ Krull (1983) is perhaps the purest example: a sincere, lavish sword-and-sorcery adventure with a teleporting fortress, a five-bladed throwing weapon and early roles for actors who later became well known. It disappointed at the box office and then lived on through home video and television repeats, loved by viewers who caught it at the right age.
The two films share some useful traits:
- Real, physical craft. Both were built on large sets with practical effects and costumes, which gives them a tactile, oddly durable texture.
- Total commitment to a weird idea. Neither film hedges. Whatever their flaws, they are unmistakably themselves.
- A generation of young viewers. Children who saw them on tape remembered the images long after the reviews were forgotten.
The key difference is expectation. Krull was an original fantasy competing with Star Wars; nobody arrived with a fixed picture of it. Super Mario Bros. had to answer to a game that millions knew intimately, so its liberties felt like betrayals rather than invention. That made its rehabilitation slower, and it has been driven as much by curiosity as by affection.
The story has a tidy coda. When an animated film finally reimagined Mario in 2023, closely following the look of the games, it became an enormous hit, confirming in hindsight what audiences had wanted all along. The 1993 version, meanwhile, keeps its place alongside Krull, Labyrinth and Masters of the Universe as one of those big, odd swings that failed in their own time and refuses to be forgotten.
Masters of the Universe on film · The God of War movie saga · All movie articles