Twenty years later, Italian-American brothers Mario and Luigi working as plumbers in Brooklyn are close to being driven out of business by mafioso Anthony Scapelli's construction company.
The brothers pursue them through an interdimensional portal to Dinohattan, where they lose track of Daisy and the rock, which is stolen by Big Bertha, the bouncer at the Boom-Boom Bar.
Mario and Luigi escape prison and go to rescue Daisy, aided by the fungus as well as Toad, a good-natured guitarist who was devolved into a Goomba, a semi-humanoid dinosaur, as punishment for a protest against Koopa.
Daisy's own escape attempt is aided by Yoshi, a pet of the royal family, and Iggy and Spike, who were mentally evolved to become intelligent and decided to turn on Koopa.
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.
[12] 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.
[13] Morton said, "We come from the Tim Burton school of filmmaking, because our background is in animation and comic books [...] So we started off basing everything in reality, and then tried to have fun and exaggerate it as much as possible.
"[19] Joffé, Morton, and Jankel agreed their approach to adapting the video games should follow the darker tone popularized by the 1989 Batman and 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
[21] Joffé viewed the games as a "mixture of Japanese fairy tales and bits of modern America",[13] and wanted to create a "slightly mythic vision of New York".
[19] 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.
"[17] Though working well with the directors, Bennett and Runté were dismissed by the producers for being too comedic and the British writing team of Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais were brought on to deliver a more adult and feminist tone.
However, producers Joffé and Eberts feared the project had both skewed too far from the intended young adult and family audiences, and had become too effects-heavy to film within budget, so without informing directors Morton and Jankel or the signed cast they hired screenwriters Ed Solomon and Ryan Rowe to provide a more family-friendly script with more restrained effects requirements.
[20] Production Designer David Snyder recalled: "As each script developed the fungus was sort of a metaphor for the mushroom element in a Nintendo game.
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.
"[35] Richard Edson claimed 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.
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.
[19] Tatopoulos described Yoshi as "an abstract, fantasy T. rex",[24] and designed the baby dinosaur with large eyes to evoke a softer and less menacing quality.
Woods explained that "it was much too expensive in those days to put a whole film through [the scanner]," so only those shots were scanned by Kodak, which animator and compositor Sheena Duggal stated was the first time the company had ever done so.
[41] In the United States and Canada, Super Mario Bros. only collected $8.5 million during its opening weekend, ranking in fourth place at the box office below Cliffhanger, Made in America and Dave.
He gave the film high marks for its effects and the "sheer density and bravura of the production design", but ultimately provided a low final score for poor writing.
[55] Janet Maslin of The New York Times also commended the film's visual effects, and suggested Bob Hoskins could "handle any role with grace and good humor", but concluded "it doesn't have the jaunty hop-and-zap spirit of the Nintendo video game from which it takes – ahem – its inspiration".
[56] Mark Caro of the Chicago Tribune said "The movie's no stinker", lauded Hoskins and Leguizamo for their brotherly dynamic, and called the Goombas "wonderfully daffy supporting characters".
As of 2018[update], fan website Super Mario Bros.: The Movie Archive was working with original VFX Supervisor Christopher F. Woods on a 4K resolution transfer and restoration.
"[77] He added, "My six-year-old son at the time – he's now 18 – he said, 'Dad I think you're probably a pretty good actor, but why did you play that terrible guy King Koopa in Super Mario Bros.?'
'"[78] By her part, Mathis in 2018 referred to the film as "not [my] proudest moment as an actor", but added: "[I]t's maybe [the one] that I get asked the most about [...] There are a lot of people who are really excited to meet me because I was [Princess] Daisy.
"[83] Aaron Horvath, co-director of 2023’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie, felt the film differentiated from what he had hoped for in an adaptation of the games growing up, although he conceded to retrospectively enjoying it.
He said, "Most of the [cast and crew] were very happy about it because, at the time, it was a very revolutionary movie [...] They were introducing a lot of great special effects that hadn't been done before, and they had these really talented actors, and it was a project they were proud to work on.
[90] Thomas Leitch has written that Super Mario Bros. is an example of post-literary adaptation and that it "drops facetious references" to The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars, and Doctor Zhivago.
[91]: 267 Stephen Hunter of The Baltimore Sun compared the Goombas to the winged monkeys of The Wizard of Oz, suggesting they similarly evoke a "mix of pity and terror".
[57][91]: 267 In 2013, fansite editors Steven Applebaum and Ryan Hoss teamed with one of the film's original screenwriters, Parker Bennett, on a fanfiction webcomic sequel.