In a new interview with SYFY Original Movie Super Mario Bros the directors explained that they tore up their script at the last minute because Disney, who was one of the film’s financiers, insisted on hiring Bill & Ted writer Ed Solomon, who ended up tearing up the original script and rewriting it. The news was shared by Super Mario Bros. directors Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel who thought what they had written would be a contender Batman (1989)
“I remember saying to Annabel, ‘That’s it. This is going to be our Batman,” Morton explained to the magazine (which has an April 2023 issue). it’s on sale now) as we discussed the original, less-than-perfect script submitted by Barry Morrow. “It was very fantasy-oriented and childish. I wanted to make a film that is mainly for children, but also has qualities that their parents can enjoy.”
“It was brilliantly esoteric,” Jankel added. “A road movie that would very likely make a fantastic movie that would probably be just as popular because it was a big step up from the game. We were animators through the visual as well, so for us Morrow’s journey didn’t work.”
“I son was obsessed with dinosaurs at the time, so the idea was that the dinosaurs weren’t really wiped out, they were just transported to another dimension and the plumbers were transported there as well. That’s how the whole story is set in motion,” explained Morton, saying the overall idea was for the narrative to serve as a meta prequel to Mario
“This was the true story of what really happened before the plumbers came back to Brooklyn. Of course, by that point they’re TV celebrities and a few Japanese Nintendo executives want to turn their story into a game, but that gets lost in translation. So we ended up with a Nintendo game.”
None of this happened after Disney, a last-minute financier, insisted on hiring Bill and Ted writer Ed Solomon to rewrite the script. “It wasn’t even the 11th hour, it was around 11:59,” said Jankel. “We thought it would be a small dialogue change, but it actually ended up being a completely different script.”
