According to Box Office Mojo, the film cost $48 million to make but took in just over $8.5 million in its opening weekend. It still hasn't made back even half of its budget.
Blake Dumesnil loves the game and saw the movie when it came out, and even though Super Mario Bros. — starring Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo — didn't gel well with the majority of critics and some audiences, he found something interesting lurking across the screen.
"The movie always had appeal to me because it has this very strange mixture but it's also very much a product of the time it came out," he says. "It's this bright, colorful and very well-designed game the subject matter is based on, and I was always fascinated with how they did try hard to translate these things into a live action film."
Dumesnil says that beyond the insane story that took more than nine different script concepts to produce, he greatly admired the sets, effects and props made for the movie that took inspiration from films like Alien and were designed by people who worked on movies such as Blade Runner, Avatar and even the new Super Mario Bros. Movie coming to theaters next month. He's amassed the largest collection of props, memorabilia and costumes made for the 1993 movie and it's all currently on display at the National Video Game Museum (NVGM) in Frisco for a second time for the rest of the year.
The National Video Game Museum in Frisco opened a new exhibition on Friday with items from the 1993 Super Mario Bros. movie.
Blake Dumesnil
"The 30th anniversary is a big deal," says NVGM director John Hardie. "Blake has collected a lot more pieces that weren't available to him back then and we figured with the timing of the new movie coming out, it's time to capitalize on it and bring back a bigger, better version of that exhibit."
The first Super Mario Bros. movie attempts to recreate the game in a live action environment by imagining the Mushroom Kingdom as a parallel dimension to Earth created by the meteorite that "killed" the dinosaurs 30 million years ago. The evil King Koopa, played by Dennis Hopper, has turned the kingdom into a dystopian hellscape and plans to meld both dimensions together to expand his empire, but he needs a magical piece of the meteorite to make it happen. The rock is being held by Daisy, played by Samantha Mathis, who has carried it around with her since she was left on the doorstep of a church as a baby and is completely unaware of her royal lineage.
The story calls for some elaborate scenery and props that attempt to mirror some aspects of the game, such as a fireball shooting rifles instead of "fire flowers" and pneumatic boots powered by "Bullet Bills" that allow the Mario brothers to jump great distances.
"I really like the tangible nature of the Bullet Bills and B-bombs and how they used flamethrower guns to represent fireballs," Dumesnil says. "I personally like the more adult approach of these spots of bold colors and things used in the costuming and the '90s vibe that uses a lot of geometric shapes and pastels with costuming."
Dumesnil says he started searching for props and pieces from the movie when he found one of Mario's jump boots on eBay. He couldn't afford to buy it at the time but he later tracked down the person who put it up for sale and offered to buy more props, pieces of art and other stuff to put on display in his Houston home.
"It turns out he was the original prop master for the movie and we started chatting and that's when he let me know that didn't have any more boots or anything but we had a couple of key items like the Bullet Bill and the meteorite necklace," Dumesnil says. "That's what really got the ball rolling."
The NVGM first displayed some of the movie's props and costumes in 2018, but since then Dumesnil has amassed 50 movie props, 50 pieces of memorabilia, toys and other promotional products made for the movie's release and over 100 original artworks and blueprints for the film's sets, costumes and props.
Hardie says "it was surprising" to hear reactions to the first incarnation of the exhibition and learn that the movie had so many dedicated fans.
"The first time we did it, I wasn't expecting anything because it's a tough movie to watch but it has a cult following and we were shocked at how much people were into it," Hardie says. "The response was so positive that it was another factor in bringing it back."
