A Super Mario Bros. Star Declared The '90s Movie 'The Worst Thing I Ever Did'

He might not always have received the recognition he deserved, but Bob Hoskins was one of the great actors of his generation. Just contrast his portrayal of ruthless Cockney crime boss Harold Shand in  "The Long Good Friday" with his performance as the dignified, avuncular butler Lionel Bloch in 2002's "Maid in Manhattan." The English star really could do it all and proved as much throughout a truly stellar career. But even Hoskins made missteps, and according to him, his biggest came when he agreed to play Mario alongside John Leguizamo as Luigi in "Super Mario Bros."

2025's "The Super Mario Bros. Movie" became one of the 20 biggest movies ever at the box office. 1993's "Super Mario Bros.," in comparison, became one of the biggest and most infamous flops of all time. But it wasn't just commercial performance that separated these two adaptations. The 1993 film was, by all accounts, a complete debacle from beginning to end. Being on the set of this misguided fantasy adventure sounds like a major drag, with "Super Mario Bros." stars openly mocking the script and the husband-and-wife directing duo Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel during filming.

Even after the film debuted to a disappointing $20.9 million domestic total at the box office (the international gross is thought to have been around $18 million), the controversy persisted. Hoskins and President Koopa actor Dennis Hopper continued to trash the directors and their experience on the film, all of which ensured Nintendo held onto the Super Mario license for another 30 years, before allowing Illumination to make the vastly more successful animated movie in 2025. With all that in mind, it's not really surprising that Hoskins considered "Super Mario Bros." to be "the worst thing [he] ever did."

Some might argue that "Super Mario Brothers" is more interesting than you remember. Some, like Bob Hoskins, would disagree. At least he did before he passed away in 2014. In a 2007 The Guardian interview, the actor referred to the film as "a f****** nightmare," adding, "It had a husband-and-wife team directing whose arrogance had been mistaken for talent. After so many weeks, their own agent told them to get off the set!"

It was far from the first time Hoskins had spoken so sharply about his experience on the movie. During a 2002 press conference at the San Sebastian Film Festival (via the Super Mario Bros. movie archive), he was asked what attracted him to the video game adaptation and took the opportunity to bash the directors. Once again, he claimed the pairs' arrogance "convinced everybody of their genius," adding, "But I'm afraid the genius wasn't there." According to Hoskins, the screenplay actually started off as "very good," but the actor claimed Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel "threw the script away" on the first day. "They said, 'We'll do this our way,'" he recalled, "And when they'd gone over ten million dollars, their own agents threw them off the set, then we said, 'We've got to finish this film ourselves.'"

Ed Solomon, who worked on the script, seemed to back up Hoskins' claims in a separate Guardian interview. He recalled visiting the set only to find that Morton had spliced elements of older drafts into his newer screenplay. "Rocky had cut it up with a bunch of other stuff he liked from other drafts and a bunch of new stuff," recalled Solomon. "Literally chopped it into pieces and taped it together. There was no through line."

Contrary to Bob Hoskins' claim that the directors of "Super Mario Bros." were thrown off the set, Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel did finish their time on the film. But they were indeed dismissed before the movie was technically finished, with Princess Daisy actor Samantha Mathis, telling The Guardian in 2018, "We were supposed to wrap the movie, but our producers determined that we still had two and a half to three weeks of shooting to do. The directors were thanked and told: 'You can leave now, we're going to make the rest of the movie without you.'"

However, the rest of Hoskins' recollections seem to have been accurate. In his comments at the 2002 San Sebastian Film Festival, the actor claimed that, following the directors being dismissed, the film's editor arrived and said, "I don't know what we are gonna do, we haven't one single finished scene." After this, Hoskins recalled having a week or two in which to "cobble together the film." Ultimately, in his view, this turned "what could have been a very, very interesting film" into "complete rubbish."

When it did finally arrive, the disastrous "Super Mario Bros." set the tone for video game movies for years to come, which is to say it set a standard for subpar video game adaptations. That said, the film does have its fans, one of whom is /Film's own Witney Seibold, who argues that "Super Mario Bros." is better than 2025's "The Super Mario Brothers Movie" in every way. Indeed, the 1993 version has developed a significant cult following and is certainly a more interesting collection of ideas than the safe and sanitized animated alternative. Still, it seems Hoskins never came around to it.