Despite the continued popularity of the video game series, it’s been 24 years since we last saw Mortal Kombat brought to the big screen. Paul W.S. Anderson’s 1995 original is a cheese-filled cult favorite, but sequel Annihilation was terrible whatever way you choose to look at it.
That being said, the franchise did manage to spin itself off into one animated and one live-action spinoff, both of which only ran for a season each before being canceled. A Mortal Kombat reboot, meanwhile, remained stuck in development hell for two decades, before finally being brought to life by first-time feature director Simon McQuoid under the stewardship of Warner Bros. and James Wan’s Atomic Monster Productions.
Indeed, it hasn’t been an easy road for Mortal Kombat, which initially wrapped filming in December 2019 before being caught in the uncertainty caused by the Coronavirus pandemic. Originally scheduled for January of this year, the project was pulled from the calendar indefinitely and was then slapped with an April release, when it will debut simultaneously in theaters and on HBO Max as part of WarnerMedia’s potentially game-changing strategy.
Everyone involved has been talking up the new version of Mortal Kombat at every opportunity as well, and based on the first trailer, it certainly looks as though it’s going to deliver. The entire cast definitely fits the bill of their video game counterparts, while the visuals are crisp and the action promises to be as bone-crunching as we’ve been led to believe.
Hopes are high that Mortal Kombat could be just the beginning of a multi-film series, too, and if the final product matches the ambition shown in the trailer, then there’s no reason to believe that it won’t kick off a franchise.
