Draft:Super Mario Bros. in film

Super Mario Bros. have appeared in six feature-length films based on Nintendo's Super Mario video game series. They theatrically debuted in a 1986 animated feature film, a 1993 feature film was produced by Hollywood Pictures and distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. A fully animated reboot titled The Super Mario Bros. Movie was released in April 2023, produced by Illumination and released by Universal Pictures.

The Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach! (1986)
In 1986, Mario was already popular in Japan, so Grouper Productions collaborated with Nintendo to produce an anime film. To advertise the film, they released Mario phone cards, watches, rice containers, ramen noodles, a manga, an art book, three riddle books, a picture book, and an original soundtrack released on vinyl and cassette.

On July 20, 1986, the film was released in theaters across Japan. VAP Video later released the film on retail VHS and Betamax in Japan, with no releases internationally or on DVD or Blu-ray.

Super Mario Bros. (1993)
The suggestion for a film based on Super Mario Bros. was first put forward by Roland Joffé during a script meeting at his production company Lightmotive. Joffé met Nintendo of America president and Hiroshi Yamauchi's son-in law, Minoru Arakawa. He presented Arakawa with an initial draft of the script. One month after their meeting, Joffé went to Nintendo's headquarters in Kyoto to meet Hiroshi Yamauchi. He pitched to Yamauchi the storyline which led to Nintendo receiving interest in the project. Joffé left with a $2 million contract giving the temporary control of the character of Mario over to Joffé. Nintendo retained merchandising rights for the film through a "creative partnership" with Lightmotive.

When Yamauchi asked Joffé why Nintendo should sell the rights to Lightmotive over a major company, Joffé assured them that Nintendo would have more control over the film. However, Nintendo had no interest in creative control and believed the Mario brand was strong enough to allow an experiment with an outside industry. Joffé said, "I think they looked at the movie as some sort of strange creature that was kind of rather intriguing to see if we could walk or not". He wondered, "How do we catch this wonderful mixture of images and inputs and strangeness?" The first screenplay was written by Oscar-winning screenwriter Barry Morrow. His story followed brothers Mario and Luigi on an existential road trip so similar to Morrow's prior Rain Man that production titled the script "Drain Man". Morrow described his screenplay as "a study in contrast, like Laurel and Hardy or Abbott and Costello", that would have "an odyssey and a quest" like the game itself. Co-producer Fred Caruso later said that Morrow's story was "more of a serious drama piece as opposed to a fun comedy".

Screenwriters Jim Jennewein and Tom S. Parker were brought on next to write a more traditional adaptation. Jennewein said, "So right away we knew that the best way to do this is to essentially have a journey into this world, not unlike The Wizard of Oz." His and Parker's take on the story was to subvert and satirize fairy tale clichés, and to focus on the relationship between Mario and Luigi. Jennewein said, "Essentially what we did was what Shrek did [...] And we knew the story had to be about the brothers and that the emotional through-line would be about the brothers." Greg Beeman of License to Drive was attached to direct and development had already moved into pre-production, but the failure of Beeman's recent Mom and Dad Save the World led to his dismissal by nervous producers. Joffé then offered Harold Ramis the director position, but though he was a fan of the video game, Ramis declined the opportunity, which he later said he was "glad" about and which the Associated Press would observe was his "smartest career decision".

Joffé said, "We tried some various avenues that didn't work, that came up too medieval or somehow wasn't the right thing. I felt the project was taking a wrong turn [...] And that's when I began thinking of Max Headroom." Joffé traveled to Rome to meet with creators Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel. 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." 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. Joffé said, "This wasn't Snow White and the Seven Dinosaurs [...] The dino world was dark. We didn't want to hold back." Morton described the film as a prequel to the video games that tells the "true story" behind Nintendo's inspiration. Interview: Rocky Morton On The Chaos Of Directing The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Nintendo Life. November 3, 2014 (retrieved November 3, 2014)

The above text is from the Super Mario Wiki and is available under a Creative Commons license. Attribution must be provided through a list of authors or a link back to the original article. Source: https://www.mariowiki.com/Super_Mario_Bros._(film) Joffé viewed the games as a "mixture of Japanese fairy tales and bits of modern America", and wanted to create a "slightly mythic vision of New York". Screenwriter Parker Bennett elaborated: "Our take on it was that Nintendo interpreted the events from our story and came up with the video game. We basically worked backwards." The film also took inspiration from Die Hard, Mad Max, and Blade Runner.

The concept of a parallel universe inhabited by dinosaurs was inspired by Dinosaur Land from the recently released Super Mario World. 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. Joffé noted, "It's a wonderful parody of New York and heavy industry [...] We call it the New Brutalism." Screenwriters Parker Bennett and Terry Runté were tasked with balancing comedy with a darker tone: Bennett said, "Ghostbusters was the model [...] We were aiming towards funny, but kind of weird and dark."

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 hired to deliver a more adult and feminist tone. Princess Daisy and Lena's roles were expanded and Bertha was introduced as a black woman. With this script, the main cast signed, and Bob Hoskins was finally convinced to take the role of Mario. The film officially moved into pre-production. 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. The script doctoring was partially motivated by Disney purchasing the film's distribution rights. The cast only discovered the new screenplay upon arriving in Wilmington, North Carolina.

Directors Morton and Jankel considered leaving the project but decided to stay after discussing together and realizing that no other director could at that point understand the material enough to properly adapt it. Morton and Jankel also said they owed it to the cast and crew and believed they could reclaim their vision during production. Rowe returned home to work on another project, but Solomon remained for several weeks to provide additional rewrites. Without invitation, Bennett and Runté took a road trip to Wilmington whereupon they were immediately re-hired. They would remain through production to provide final rewrites, dialogue for ADR, and the dialogue for the expository animated dinosaur opening. The intelligent fungus was inspired by both the Mushroom Kingdom from the games and tabloid reports of a discovered gigantic fungus. Production Designer David Snyder recalled: "As each script developed the fungus was sort of a metaphor for the mushroom element in a Nintendo game." Joffé reflected, "For me a screenplay is never finished [...] You work a screenplay all the time. When you bring actors in a screenplay goes through another evolution. So you can say that rather like the fungus in the movie the screenplay constantly evolves."

The Super Mario Bros. Movie
After the critical and commercial failure of the 1993 Super Mario Bros. film adaptation, the Japanese video game company Nintendo became wary of licensing its properties for film adaptations. According to Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Mario, the idea for a new Mario film came from bringing their older games to the Virtual Console and other services. Such transitions took time for the company, and Miyamoto recognized that "our content business would be able to develop even further if we were able to combine our long-beloved software with that of video assets, and utilize them together for extended periods". Miyamoto knew that the process of making a film was far different from that of making a video game, and wanted a film expert to lead the effort.

Following the November 2014 hack of Sony Pictures, emails between producer Avi Arad, studio chief Amy Pascal, TriStar Pictures head Tom Rothman, and Sony Pictures Animation president of production Michelle Raimo Kouyate were released, revealing that Sony had been attempting to secure the film rights to the Mario franchise for several years. Arad visited Nintendo in Tokyo in February and July 2014 in an attempt to secure a deal. In October, Arad emailed Pascal and said he had closed the deal with Nintendo. Pascal suggested recruiting Sony Pictures Animation's Hotel Transylvania director Genndy Tartakovsky to help develop the project, while Kouyate said she could "think of 3–4 movies right out of the gate" and hoped to build a "Mario empire". However, after the emails leaked, Arad denied that a deal had been made, stating that negotiations had only begun. BuzzFeed News noted that the emails did not take into account potential conflicts with Sony Pictures' corporate sibling Sony Interactive Entertainment, one of Nintendo's chief competitors. Through Nintendo's work with Universal Parks & Resorts to create Mario-based attractions, later resulting in Super Nintendo World, Miyamoto met Chris Meledandri, founder of Universal Pictures' Illumination animation division. Miyamoto found Meledandri's creative process similar to his own and felt he would be the proper lead for a Mario film. They had started more earnest discussions by 2016, knowing that if they felt it would not work that they could easily walk away. In November 2017, reports emerged that Nintendo was collaborating with Universal and Illumination to make an animated Mario film. Then-Nintendo president Tatsumi Kimishima clarified that a deal had not been finalized, but that an announcement would come soon. Kimishima hoped that if the deal were successful, a 2020 release date would be possible.

In January 2018, Nintendo announced that the film would progress with Miyamoto and Meledandri co-producing. Meledandri said the film was a "priority" for Illumination and that it would most likely come out in 2022. He added that Miyamoto would be "front and center" during production. In January 2020, Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa stated that the film was "moving along smoothly" with an expected 2022 release date. Furukawa also said Nintendo would own the rights to the film, and both Nintendo and Universal would fund the production.

In August 2021, it emerged that Teen Titans Go! creators Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic were directing the film after the discovery of an Illumination animator's LinkedIn profile that included the film in their list. Following the full casting announcement, Horvath and Jelenic were confirmed to be directing, with Matthew Fogel attached as the screenwriter after previously scribing Illumination's Minions: The Rise of Gru (2022). According to Khary Payton, who has collaborated with Horvath and Jelenic on various projects at Warner Bros. Animation, the duo flew to Illumination Studios Paris a month after the release of their first feature film, Teen Titans Go! To the Movies, in September 2018.

In September 2022, it was announced by New York Comic Con that the film's teaser trailer would be released on October 6, 2022; the teaser formally revealed the film's title, The Super Mario Bros. Movie. Shortly thereafter, Ed Skudder, who previously worked with Horvath on Unikitty!, confirmed that he worked as head of story on the film.

Untitled The Super Mario Bros. Movie sequel (2026)
In May 2021, Furukawa said that Nintendo was interested in producing more animated films based on its intellectual properties if the Mario film is successful. In a Variety cover story before the film's release, producer Meledandri was asked about potential sequels, or projects adapted from other Nintendo properties, and answered, "Our focus right now is entirely on bringing the film out to the audience, and at this time, we're not prepared to talk about what’s coming in the future". The film's post-credits scene hints at a potential sequel featuring Yoshi. Jack Black has expressed interest in Pedro Pascal being cast to voice Wario in the future film.

John Leguizamo, who previously portrayed Luigi in the 1993 live-action film, expressed interest in participating in a potential sequel on the condition of more diversity within the cast.

On April 21, 2023, following the film's box office success, Nintendo stated that there would be more films based on their properties, though they did not directly confirm a sequel to The Super Mario Bros. Movie. In November, it was revealed that Universal was making plans to build a larger franchise around the film while also confirming a sequel. In December, Black expressed interest in the sequel being a musical titled Bowser's Revenge. On March 10, 2024, as part of Mario Day celebrations, Miyamoto and Meledandri officially announced "a new Super Mario Bros. movie", along with a release date of April 3, 2026 in the United States and more dates between April for other territories.

Spin-off
In February 2022, Charlie Day expressed interest in reprising his role as Luigi in a Luigi's Mansion film and reiterated his interest in March 2023. In April 2023, Seth Rogen expressed interest in Donkey Kong Country forming the basis of future works, stating it created "a lot of opportunity" for a spin-off film. That same month, Anya-Taylor Joy in talks about the possibility of a Princess Peach spin-off movie.

Other
In April 2022, Sonic the Hedgehog 2 director Jeff Fowler expressed interest in a future potential crossover film between Sonic the Hedgehog and the Universal Pictures' Mario film by Illumination Entertainment, tentatively entitled "Mario Versus Sonic", agreeing that "it would take a bit of rights-wrangling and negotiations [to] make it happen", but concluding that "there's a little twinkle in his eye about it all".