John Leguizamo says the 1993 Super Mario Bros. movie originally had a 'dark, dark vision'
John Leguizamo said the 1993 Super Mario Bros. film had a ‘dark, dark vision’.
The 62-year-old actor played Luigi in the live-action film, which was directed by Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel.
Following the release of the hugely successful animated Super Mario Bros. film this month, the Violent Night star has shared new details about the production.
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In what was the first attempt to bring the plumber brothers to the big screen, directors Morton and Jankel envisioned a much darker storyline and distributor Disney, under its old Buena Vista banner, was apparently unhappy with the direction.
The studio became privy to the 'dark' vision after buying the rights to the movie several weeks before shooting began.
"They had this dark, dark vision that Disney was not OK with so there was all this butt-heading that was incredible," Leguizamo shared in an interview with GQ this month.
The Emmy-award winning actor said Disney demanded several rewrites to the script to make the film more family-friendly, but one explicit moment managed to slip through the cracks and made it into the final film.
"That party scene? Those were all strippers from North Carolina that they put on the set and they had them in the most revealing clothes and costumes," he said regarding the sequence set in the Boom Boom Bar nightclub.
It’s worth mentioning that the film was classed PG by the Motion Picture Association of America.
Still, Disney ‘was not happy’ when they saw the scene and made efforts to tone down its content as much as they could.
"They had to cut a lot of it, blow it out, CGI it with whatever bad technology they had back in the day," the actor said.
UNILAD has approached Disney for comment.
Leguizamo didn’t divulge any more of the ‘dark’ content originally intended for the film, which is well-known among Super Mario Bros. fans for being a huge flop at the box office.
Ever since its release in 1993, the film – which also starred Bob Hoskins as Mario - has been used as an example of how difficult it is to make film adaptations of video games ever since.
Despite being a massive box office disappointment, it has developed a cult following, partly due to the lore surrounding what was scrapped from the original version of the film.
In an interview with Nintendo Life in 2014, Morton addressed the original 'dark' vision and said: "The reaction from the studios was that the script that was written was too dark and too adult, and it should be rewritten — or de-written, as I called it — to a lower level, adding stupid gags and making it more childlike, which is what happened."
Topics: Film and TV, Super Mario, Celebrity
Gregory Robinson