Hype is high for the Mortal Kombat reboot, even if the video game genre hasn’t given fans many reasons to get excited over the last three decades. The genre has constantly been plagued by inconsistency, and frequently subjected to critical and commercial disaster, but everyone involved continues to say all the right things.
The first footage drew widespread praise from the fanbase, and clearly converted more than a few viewers who aren’t as heavily invested in the property after it became the most-watched red band movie trailer in YouTube history. The cast and crew, meanwhile, have constantly been talking up the intense fight sequences, buckets of blood, oodles of gore and game-accurate fatalities, to the extent that producer Todd Garner is now warning fans not to get their hopes up too much.
In a new interview, Garner admitted that while Mortal Kombat is very much a hard R-rated martial arts action movie that doesn’t skimp on what people want to see, the project still has to abide by the guidelines set out by the Motion Picture Association of America in order to avoid the dreaded NC-17, which is regarded as something of a death knell for any movie.
“First of all, it’s CG characters, so it’s not real. So obviously the bar being raised for the violence. I’m under the restrictions of the Motion Picture Association of America. So, I have to live inside those rules. So, we’re going to do as much as we can. It’s going to definitely be R-rated, definitely be violent. There’s crazy sh*t you do in the games. I don’t know if you really want to see Ludi Lin get his head ripped off.”
Of course, the fantasy elements of Mortal Kombat provide plenty of leeway to increase the levels of violence within the context of the story, when we’re talking about characters with a variety of special abilities that hail from many different realms. It isn’t as though it’s going to be watered down, either, but those expecting spinal cords to be getting ripped out with reckless abandon may have to temper their expectations, even if just a tiny little bit.
