The $5m deal-breaker that saved Tom Hanks from the worst movie of 1993: “The stench of it stays with everybody”
Looking back, 1993 was the defining year in Tom Hanks‘ career, and not only for the most obvious reasons, with the actor dodging one of the most cursed bullets in modern Hollywood.
While he was already a star and an Academy Award nominee by then, he hadn’t quite established himself as a dramatic force to be reckoned with. That year, Hanks took top billing in two pictures that couldn’t have been more different but were equally instrumental in cementing him on the A-list.
In June, he reunited with Meg Ryan in Nora Ephron’s Sleepless in Seattle, which recouped its budget ten times over at the box office, earned him a Golden Globe nomination for ‘Best Actor – Musical or Comedy’, became a rom-com classic, and reinforced his credentials as a big-screen comic and romantic lead.
In December, Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia premiered, with Hanks’ breakthrough dramatic turn, without having to rely on the light-hearted bells and whistles that had been his bread and butter up until then, netting him his first of two consecutive Academy Awards for ‘Best Actor’.
And to think, things could have been much different. Much different and unthinkably worse, since he’d agreed to a $5 million payday to play Luigi in Super Mario Bros, the worst mainstream release of 1993, a film despised by almost all of the people involved, and the first big-budget video game adaptation that wasted no time in cursing the entire genre.
The first big name to try and get a Super Mario Bros movie off the ground was Dustin Hoffman, of all people, who attempted to acquire the rights to play the title role, with Danny DeVito as Luigi and his Rain Man director, Barry Levinson, behind the camera, but DeVito wasn’t interested, which was smart of him.
However, Jeff Ryan claimed in his book, Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America, that once the film had entered active development, $5 million was dangled in front of Hanks’ face to play Mario’s brother, and he was on board until Nintendo stepped in and refused to pay that much for an actor who’d had a couple of recent flops and couldn’t quite prove themselves as a draw.
John Leguizamo played the part, which he hated, alongside Bob Hoskins, who arguably hated it more, with Dennis Hopper, who also hated it, as the villain. The movie was an unmitigated disaster, with Richard Edson, who played Spike Koopa, summing it up nicely: “When you’re involved with such a big disaster, the stench of it sort of stays with everybody,” he said. “You have to be careful. If you’re going to sell your soul, you’d better be getting more than just money out of it.”
There’s an alternate universe out there where, in 1993, Hanks didn’t star in Sleepless in Seattle and Philadelphia, but Super Mario Bros, which makes you wonder how things would have turned out for him in the long term with such a damning black mark against his name.
