How does a would-be blockbuster become a disastrous flop? A look at the decisions, large and small, that doomed Super Mario Bros. in the early 1990s:
“You can learn a lot about the way the movie industry works in a given moment by looking at its successes (whether accidental or engineered), but often you can learn even more by looking at its failures — the long-in-development projects that never make it to the screen, the labors of love gone wrong, the should’ve-been blockbusters that fail to land — particularly those that caught Hollywood by surprise, miscalculations that everyone involved has attempted to sweep under the rug. By digging up some of these misbegotten artifacts and examining them both within the context of their eras and in the cold light of the present, we’ll try to understand how seemingly inexplicable disasters happen.”
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