Why did Super Mario Bro's (1993) Fail?
Super Mario Bro's was the first real film based fully on a video game which had become one of the most popular video games there have ever been. Yet this film was still a flop.
From the Internet Movie database (imdb) i can see that this film made a big loss on their film as the budget for this was $42 million and the gross was nearly $21 million. This is a 50% loss which is a massive loss for a film which was so popular in the gaming medium.
This film got many bad reviews and was only enjoyed by a very small minority of the audience. Some reviews this film got are below;
Frank Ochleng : "Super Mario Bros. is about as playful and challenging as an unplugged pinball machine."
Stephen Garrett : "It will baffle kids, bore adolescents, and depress adults."
Tim Brayton : "As the ad campaign helpfully pointed out, "this ain't no game, it's a live-action thrill ride." Half-true: it is surely not a game, for it is typically held that games are pleasurable."
This gives evidence to why i felt this film failed which is written below.
Reasons why this film did not succeed was due to, it had nothing similar to the video game franchise apart from a few stereotypical characters from the game and a fairly similar goal for the narrative (to save the princess) but this film took the narrative and changed it completely. From innocently jumping on mushroom headed foes and facing a spiky shelled turtle to flame-throwers, dark settings, guns, explosions and creepy looking monsters. This turned the game from an innocent but amusing plot to a action driven narrative which many fans did not like and with good reason. It took all the conventions of the video game and scrapped them to bring in a new narrative to aim it at an older audience that were driven by action thriller films but by doing so, they lost the main point of the video game and went off track to something that just wasn't Mario anymore.
