Assassin’s Creed is the latest hit videogame to be reimagined by Hollywood for the bigscreen. Mark Craven looks at the hits and misses of this cinematic sideline, beginning with Bob Hoskins wearing dungarees...
WITH A FILM industry cranking out hundreds of movies a year, finding new stories to tell can be problematic. Someone, somewhere, needs to have an idea, and then that idea has to be gambled upon – with bets sometimes running to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
It’s not a surprise, then, to discover that total originality isn’t always the key thing when it comes to a script getting the green light. Fresh concepts do break big at the box office – James Cameron’s Avatar being the most obvious example – but studio execs are comforted by knowing that a potential production already has a fanbase familiar with the material, and is ready and waiting to pre-order a cinema seat. Exhibit A: the number of sequels and reboots cluttering up multiplexes. Exhibit B: 1993’s Super Mario Bros. movie…
Yes, that’s right. The first computer game - to- movie adaptation followed the exploits of a pair of Italian American plumbers battling dinosaur descendants in another dimension. Perhaps if that had been a story outline knocked up from scratch, it wouldn’t have got past the first draft, but the Super Mario Bros game series, from Japanese developer Nintendo, was simply huge in the early 1990s. Huge enough to birth a movie with a $50m budget, Dennis Hopper and Bob Hoskins amongst the cast, and a Summer release date.
The movie itself – available on UK Blu-ray since 2014 via Second Sight and more recently in a Zavvi-exclusive Steelbook – was a damp squib that even Mario couldn't have fixed. Critics hated it. The people starring in it hated it. And audiences also hated it, ensuring a box office belly-flop that meant it failed to recoup its production costs. But was Super Mario Bros. the end of the notion of turning popular videogames into movies? No. The flood gates were open. And things were about to get fighty.
This story is from the May 2017 edition of Home Cinema Choice.
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This story is from the May 2017 edition of Home Cinema Choice.
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