Directors Were ‘Abandoned by Hollywood’ After ‘Reviled’ 1993 Film. Then Quentin Tarantino Helped Vindicate Them

https://variety.com/2023/film/news/1993-super-mario-bros-movie-directors-what-went-wrong-1235574696/

The live-action 1993 film, starring Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo as Mario and Luigi, bombed at the box office and landed on various “Worst Movies of All Time” lists, later developing a passionate cult following. In the directors’ own words, “Super Mario Bros.” was so “reviled” that it left a “black mark” on the married couple’s careers.

That is, until a midnight screening held at Quentin Tarantino’s New Beverly Cinema on March 11 “washed away the stain.”

“My thought was that there would be 10 or 20 people there,” Morton tells Variety. “But it was jam-packed. There were people queueing up around the block for extra tickets.” During the film, Morton says the audience was “laughing and clapping at all the right places. They weren’t doing it ironically; it was genuine.”
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The production of 1993’s “Super Mario Bros.” was marred by drunken actors (Leguizamo later claimed he drank whiskey with Hoskins during shooting), last-minute rewrites and explosive fights between the producers and the directors.

“Two weeks before the first day of principal photography, the script was rewritten completely,” Morton says. “The producers forbade me to talk to the writer. But I called him up one night because I was building all these incredible sets and monsters and prosthetics. And I said, ‘You need to know what I’m building and what to keep in the script, because we spent all this money on this stuff already.’ When the producers found out I did this call, they went absolutely ballistic at me — they ripped into me. And it scared me.”

Morton continues, “Of course, the actors all signed up on our original script, and when the new script came in, Annabel and I had to justify the new script. We had to pretend that it was great and convince the actors to go along with it.”