Exactly three months from today, the Mortal Kombat reboot will arrive on the big screen and HBO Max, with fans hoping that it delivers the goods. Every video game adaptation comes surrounded by question marks given how inconsistent the genre has always proven to be, but based on everything we’ve seen and heard so far, Simon McQuoid’s feature directorial debut is looking incredibly promising.
The filmmaker has assembled a solid cast of established talents and rising stars, many of whom boast no shortage of martial arts experience, while an R-rating promises buckets of blood and gore in translating the signature Fatalities into live-action. The first batch of official images were released yesterday, too, meaning that a trailer surely won’t be far away.
With the marketing campaign slowly begin to ramp up, then, McQuoid and his cast have been revealing the first real plot and story information, and the director has made it clear that Mortal Kombat isn’t going to be for the faint of heart.
“It’s definitely not gonna get a PG-13 rating. Out of context this quote might seem incendiary, it’s not. The rules around ratings aren’t what a lot of people think they are. It’s amount of blood, it’s amount of red, it’s interpretation of how you go about it. We had a lot of discussions about getting the balance right so there was gore and there was blood and there were Fatalities. And there is gore, blood, and Fatalities.”
So far, everyone involved is saying all of the right things, but fans have been burned by plenty of video game adaptations in the past, especially ones that stick a little too close to the source material for inspiration. After all, the only two entries in the genre to ever secure a Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes are Sonic the Hedgehog and Detective Pikachu, both of which were broad family adventures that largely told an original story.
Obviously, the brutal and R-rated Mortal Kombat is an entirely different proposition, but let’s just hope that McQuoid and his team have struck the balance to ensure the movie appeals to both fans of the games and action cinema in general.
