Why is the Super Mario Bros. Movie Coming Back to Life?

Following the theatrical release of the Sonic The Hedgehog movie and the announcement of a sequel featuring Tails and Knuckles, it was perhaps inevitable that a Super Mario Bros. film would surface in some form or another – and, it did. However, all we know about it so far is that it’s animated and that it stars an all-star cast, including Chris Pratt, Jack Black, Anya Taylor-Joy, and actual Mario voice actor Charles Martinet.

Detective Pikachu    

Despite a legacy going back to the video gaming stone age, there have only been three Mario films made to date. This wouldn’t have caused much of a stir until recently, as video games that receive the silver screen treatment are usually a waste of performers’ good talent. With Sonic and Detective Pikachu, not to mention the recent Mortal Kombat movie, the inevitability of movie garbage seems to be changing.

There’s an obvious question to be asked here. As a video game, why bother with a movie at all? Mario has already found success in just about every medium. However, increasingly, franchises of all descriptions tend to take a cross-platform approach to their characters and stories. For Mario and Sonic, this takes the form of comic books, cartoons, collectibles, and, most recently of all for Mario, mobile games.

Big-budget movies such as Jurassic Park and Jumanji have cast a much wider net as far as their marketing goes. Both of these popular films are included among the slots at Casino777 casino, featuring characters and iconography from the most recent entries in their respective canons. Jurassic Park also has a number of video games in its back catalog, including the 2021 sim Jurassic Park Evolution II. 

Nostalgia                      

Of course, it’s difficult to discuss Mario’s time in Hollywood without mentioning Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel’s 1993 effort Super Mario Bros. While, once again, featuring a cast of A-list actors, including Bob Hoskins, John Leguizamo, and Dennis Hopper, the movie was nevertheless about as far away from the Mario video game as it’s possible to get. For one, Hopper, as King Koopa, looked more like something from the early nineties sitcom Dinosaurs than a convincing interpretation of Bowser.

Something strange happens to movies as they get older, though. Whether through nostalgia or genuine affection, the worst films ever made tend to gain favor with movie fans, becoming cult classics. Super Mario Bros. is no exception to this rule, and the film was recently re-cut to increase its run time by twenty minutes, as per SVG. It’s an unlikely labor of love that demonstrates just how fickle viewers can be over time.

In addition, the hype surrounding the upcoming Mario movie helped push the first Super Mario Bros. movie to the top of the Amazon video sales chart earlier this year, while comments from John Leguizamo, suggesting that he knew exactly how to write a Mario film, as reported on by Looper, only served to increase interest in the 4.1/10 movie (IMDb). Whatever fans might think of the earlier film, it seems that it has returned to haunt the present.