Like it or not, the Mortal Kombat movie reboot is indeed happening. Following a brief period of uncertainty, Warner Bros has confirmed the movie will be hitting cinemas on March 5, 2021.
While that’s obviously still a fair ways off, fans of the brutal fighting game franchise will be pleased to know that Warner Bros has reiterated its commitment to the project, just a few days after revealing that the movie would finally be starting pre-production this month.
South Australia’s Premiere also announced that Mortal Kombat would be filmed and produced in Australia, making it the largest film production in the region’s history – an honour, I’m sure.
Warner Bros has been toying with the notion of a Mortal Kombat reboot since around 2011. As tends to be the case for video game movie adaptations, it languished in development hell for years, with a number of writers and directors attached to the project.
In 2016, Simon McQuoid was revealed as the movie’s director, and Greg Russo (who is also penning the Resident Evil movie reboot) announced back in February this year that he’d completed the script.
McQuoid previously gave a quote to ABC which implied certain artistic licenses will be taken with the Mortal Kombat IP, because yeah… that always works out great for these projects.
He explained:
We’ve gone back to the absolute sort of source material and we’ve taken that and we are turning that into an epic world. On the surface, the game works a certain way, but we’ve kind of gone deeper than that.
Last year, The Hashtag Show claimed that the film would introduce an entirely new character to serve as the protagonist; Cole Turner, who was described in the reports as a “struggling and widowed boxer who cares more about his young daughter than anything”.
The idea was that Cole would star alongside series mainstays Sonya and Jax, while a rumoured character suggested that Sub Zero and Scorpion wouldn’t be appearing. It’s worth noting that one of the film’s producers did claim these reports were premature, however, so take it with a pinch of salt.
The previous two Mortal Kombat live action movies (Mortal Kombat and Mortal Kombat: Annihilation) were released in 1995 and 1997 respectively. They… well, they weren’t the worst video game movies I’ve ever seen, but that’s saying much at all now, is it?
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Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.