'Super Mario Bros. Movie' Star Seth Rogen Calls 1993 Adaptation 'One of the Worst Films Ever Made'
"I think it made me realize that movies, like, could be bad. That never occurred to me until that moment," Rogen said
Seth Rogen isn't holding back on how "disappointed" he felt as a kid watching Super Mario Bros.
The 1993 film — which marked the first-ever U.S. theatrical release of a live-action movie based on a video game — starred Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo as the titular plumbers, and famously bombed at the box office. While it has gone on to be considered a cult classic by many, the movie holds just a 29% rating and audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.
Speaking with Variety at Saturday's premiere of his upcoming animated film The Super Mario Bros. Movie in Los Angeles, Rogen, 40, remembered, "When I was 11, I saw the original Mario Bros. movie and I was so excited."
"But it's one of the worst films ever made," he continued. "I was so disappointed. I think it made me realize that movies, like, could be bad. That never occurred to me until that moment."
And while the realization "really bummed [him] out," Rogen added of his new film, "It's nice to vindicate that moment. It's nice to know that 11-year-olds out there won't be disappointed in the same way that I was."
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Related: Chris Pratt Counters Super Mario Bros. Movie Criticism: "Watch the Movie, Then We Can Talk"
The original film — directed by Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel and written by Parker Bennett, Terry Runté and Ed Solomon — also starred Samantha Mathis and Dennis Hopper.
Rather than a direct adaptation of the story featured in the limited Mario games released up until that point, the plot followed Mario (the late Hoskins) and Luigi (Leguizamo, now 62) as they set out on a quest to a dystopian, dinosaur-laced alternate dimension to rescue Daisy (Mathis, now 52) from the evil clutches of King Koopa (the late Hopper) — and meet some fan-familiar friends and foes along the way.
The zany, darker film featured music from Oscar-nominated composer Alan Silvestri, who also famously scored the Back to the Future trilogy, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Forrest Gump and more, working often alongside filmmaker Robert Zemeckis. Super Mario Bros. was also the first movie to use Autodesk Flame, a CGI software that has since become an industry standard in digital effects, marking a historical jump from practical effects.
But the film's commercial failure may have prevented further adaptations over the last 30 years. As Mario franchise creator Shigeru Miyamoto told Variety recently (without naming the 1993 movie specifically), "We were fearful of all the failure of past IP adaptations, where there's a license and a distance between the original creators and the creators of the films."
"The fans get outraged and mad because the studios didn't do justice to the original work. We really didn't want a backlash," added Miyamoto, 70.
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Jack Black, who voices villain Bowser in the new film, recently told PEOPLE he has not seen the live-action movie but joked he may have been inspired by Hopper's villain anyway, without realizing it.
"I was in a movie with Dennis Hopper you wouldn't have recognized me in because I was covered in grease, Waterworld, and he was acting like Bowser in that," said Black, 53. "Then I was thinking about Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet. He was Bowser-y in that movie, too."
"I guess maybe there is a little Dennis Hopper in my soup just from osmosis. But I can't say that I've seen that. I should watch it, though," he added.
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Meanwhile, Rogen voices Donkey Kong in the new Super Mario Bros. Movie, and is also co-producing the upcoming animated film Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem.
In an interview with the A.V. Club last November, Rogen said his TMNT reboot won't be a typical action flick.
"We found a way to make it deeply personal," he said. "It's a teenage movie. We're putting a lot of our own feelings — of awkwardness and insecurity and a desire to belong and be accepted and all that — into the movie."
"And as I sit around with the other people working on [the film], I'm like, 'We found a way to care about this,' which is great," Rogen added.
The Super Mario Bros. Movie is in theaters now.
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