Legacy
In a 2007 interview, Hoskins was asked what he considered the worst choice in his acting career. He responded: "Super Mario Bros. It was a fuckin' nightmare. The whole experience was a nightmare. 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! Fuckin' nightmare. Fuckin' idiots." He and Leguizamo got drunk before each day of filming and continued to drink between takes. In a 2011 interview with The Guardian, Hoskins reiterated this response when asked, "What is the worst job you've done?", "What has been your biggest disappointment?", and "If you could edit your past, what would you change?" His answer to all three was Super Mario Bros. His son, Jack Hoskins, is a fan of the Mario series as well as the film and praised his performance.
Though Leguizamo wrote in his autobiography that he hated the film and regretted acting in it, it was widely considered his breakout role in film acting. He prepared a video message for the film's 20th anniversary in 2013, saying "I'm glad people appreciate the movie [...] It was the first, nobody had ever done it before [...] I'm proud of the movie in retrospect."
Hopper disparaged the production, recounting in 2008: "It was a nightmare, very honestly, that movie. It was a husband-and-wife directing team who were both control freaks and wouldn't talk before they made decisions. Anyway, I was supposed to go down there for five weeks, and I was there for 17. It was so over budget." He added, "My six-year-old son at the time—he's now 18—he said, 'Dad I think you're probably a pretty good actor, but why did you play that terrible guy King Koopa in Super Mario Bros.?' And I said, 'Well Henry, I did that so you could have shoes,' and he said, 'Dad, I don't need shoes that badly.'"
Morton reflected on the film in 2014 as a "harrowing" experience. Morton felt "very uneasy" being put in the position of having to defend the new script. In addition, working with Hopper was "really, really hard. Really hard. I don't think [Hopper] had a clue what was going on." He described the experience as humiliating, but was proud of the film's originality. For the film's 20th anniversary, Morton said: "I wanted parents to really get into it. At that time, there was a very hardcore movement against video games, and a lot of anti-video games sentiment. I wanted to make a film that would open it up and get parents interested in video games."
Despite not being "one of [my] proudest moment as an actor", Mathis said of the film: "[I]t's maybe [the one] that I get asked the most about [...] There are a lot of people who are really excited to meet me because I was [Princess] Daisy. That's all you can ask for as an actor—that your work, and something you were part of, left an impression on people and makes them feel good."
Co-director Jankel said, "I do feel in my heart, it was a hell of an achievement to have made it, under those circumstances, and it has in time, happily, achieved cult status [...] I am often hearing how many people loved it growing up, watch it repeatedly, and are genuine fans."
Producer Joffé remains proud: "It's not that I defend the movie, it's just that, in its own extraordinary way, it was an interesting and rich artefact and has earned its place. It has strange cult status." He never heard what Yamauchi or Nintendo thought of the finished product. He said, "They never phoned up to complain [...] They were very polite." The Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé said in 2017 that the film "left a really bad taste in the mouth of our developers" and that he had heard "horror stories" about its production from Nintendo employees.
In 2018, Phil Harnage, writer of The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!, revealed that the box office failure was considered a relief to the crew of the animated series, saying, "[We] were all very happy because everybody hated it! It was such a waste of time and talent." He added that they were never contacted about the film.
Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto said: "[In] the end, it was a very fun project that they put a lot of effort into [...] The one thing that I still have some regrets about is that the movie may have tried to get a little too close to what the Mario Bros. video games were. And in that sense, it became a movie that was about a video game, rather than being an entertaining movie in and of itself." Aaron Horvath, co-director of 2023's The Super Mario Bros. Movie, felt the film differentiated from what he had hoped for in an adaptation of the games growing up, although he conceded to retrospectively enjoying it. Seth Rogen, who voiced Donkey Kong in the 2023 film, called Super Mario Bros. one of the worst films ever made and what "made me realize that movies, like, could be bad. That never occurred to me until that moment."
