- John Leguizamo said that "Super Mario Bros." (1993) was toned down to make it appropriate for kids.
- He told GQ the directors had a "dark" vision for the film, which Disney was not on board with.
John Leguizamo said that the 1993 "Super Mario Bros." film was toned down to make it appropriate for children.
Reflecting on his role in the live-action film in which he played Luigi to Bob Hoskins' Mario, the actor said the film's directors Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel had originally envisioned a much darker storyline for the brother plumbers' first foray on the big screen.
However, this was something distributor Disney was not on board with when they purchased the rights to the movie several weeks before shooting began.
"They had this dark, dark vision that Disney was not okay with so there was all this butt-heading that was incredible," Leguizamo said in a video interview for GQ released on Monday.
While Disney demanded several rewrites to make the movie's script more family-friendly, Leguizamo said that one R-rated moment still made it into the film (which was officially classed PG by the Motion Picture Association Of America).
"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 of the sequence set in the nightclub, Boom Boom Bar.
"The Power" star explained that "Disney was not happy" when they saw the scene and made efforts to tone it down as much as they could, in any way 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," Leguizamo said.
Although Leguizamo didn't expand on how the film was originally written, it's well-known among fans of the film — which tanked at the box office but has since developed a cult following — that it went through several rewrites to make it more of a lighthearted kids film after Disney and production company Lightmotive rejected Morton and Jankel's initial vision.
According to Game Informer, one early treatment for the film resembled "Die Hard" and even featured Bruce Willis making a cameo, while another featured "Mad Max"-style death races.
Speaking to Nintendo Life in 2014, Morton 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 dewritten, as I called it — to a lower level, adding stupid gags and making it more childlike, which is what happened."
Morton said that he and Jankel, well-known commercial directors who had only directed one other film, "D.O.A" starring Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid, had to "defend the script" to the cast and crew to "encourage them to carry on."