From the cult disaster of 1993 to the animation blockbuster of 2023, through to the new film just released: Mario has had a chaotic, sincere, and ultimately rather beautiful life on the big screen.
Alexandrosse
Some franchises should never have ended up in cinemas. And then there's Mario, who went three times, in three radically different ways, and each time managed to surprise us even when it wasn't for the right reasons.
With the new film just out, the opportunity is too good to pass up: a look back at the whole story. Because between the live-action madness of 1993, the animated triumph of 2023, and this new chapter, there's an unexpected coherence. The coherence of a franchise that doesn't quite know what it is on screen and which, for precisely that reason, remains fascinating.
Let's be honest about what the 1993 Super Mario Bros. actually is. It's a strange film. Profoundly strange. A dystopian cyberpunk universe that has almost nothing to do with the games, Bob Hoskins looking like he isn't entirely sure what he's gotten himself into, Dennis Hopper as a corporate Bowser, and a vision of the Mushroom Kingdom that must still haunt Miyamoto's nightmares.
And yet.
This film breathes the 90s in a way that has become, with time, almost miraculous. The grainy photography, the sets that smell of latex and glue, the special effects you could already see ageing in theatres all of this forms today a perfect time capsule. Watching this film in 2026 is watching a version of genre cinema that no longer exists. Imperfect, audacious, strangely sincere in its madness.
We love it for that. We might even love it more for that than for what it claimed to be.
The 2023 Illumination film did something nobody had managed in thirty years: it did justice to the universe of the games. Not by being "faithful" in a mechanical way, but by understanding what makes Mario's magic the colour, the energy, the rhythm, that way the games have of making you smile without ever asking why.
It's not a great film in the dramatic sense. The screenplay is simple, the stakes predictable, the storytelling safe. But it achieves something essential: it makes you feel Mario. It translates onto screen a sensation millions of players have carried since childhood, and it does so with a visual and sonic precision that occasionally borders on prodigious.
The film was a massive hit. Logically. Because it understood that Mario at the cinema shouldn't be an adaptation, but an extension an additional space where the universe could exist differently.
With this new film, the question was simple: now that the formula works, are we going to do something with it, or just repeat it?
The answer sits somewhere between the two. The film clearly owns its lineage from 2023 same energy, same visual generosity, same relationship to fan service that never takes itself too seriously. But there are new ambitions, a willingness to go a little further, to give more substance to a universe that had the means but not yet the confidence.
This isn't a revolution. It's a confirmation. Mario is now a cinematic franchise that knows what it is, owns its strengths, and is beginning to work on its weaknesses. For a franchise that nearly fumbled its entrance into the big leagues, that's already a great deal.
What's striking, looking at these three films side by side, is how clearly each reflects the era that produced it.
1993 is Hollywood not yet knowing what to do with video games seeing a popular IP and treating it like modelling clay, with no regard for what made it special. The result is chaotic, but it has the merit of existing fully, unashamedly, in its own strangeness.
2023 is the era of studios that understood game franchises deserve respect, that fans have long memories and precise expectations. It's a film made by people who loved Mario. And you can hear it, see it, feel it.
2026 might be the beginning of something else a film that no longer merely pays homage, but starts to build.
But if we're being fully honest, there's something 1993 has that neither of the other two will ever possess.
That smell of the 90s. That way of making cinema without a safety net, without audience testing at every turn, without a machine to grind down ideas that are too sharp. The 1993 film is an organised disaster that outlived itself and became a cult classic precisely because it resembles nothing else.
In twenty years, people will still be watching that Bowser in his suit and tie with the same incredulous affection. And somehow, that's a form of immortality that films calibrated too perfectly never achieve.
Three films. Three eras. Three different relationships with the same franchise.
The first is a mishap turned cult classic, a 90s artefact that ages paradoxically better than expected. The second is a clear success, the film that needed to exist to reconcile Mario and the big screen. The third is a promise: that of a franchise finally beginning to trust itself.
We loved all three, for different reasons. And we hope there'll be a fourth.
The new Mario film is currently in cinemas
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