#Original Mortal Kombat Movie Director Is Excited for Reboot, Will Show Up as a Fanboy

Fans of the video game sensation Mortal Kombat cannot wait to see the franchise return to the big screen next year. For those who still hold the 1995 adaptation close to their hearts, it will no doubt be uplifting to hear that director Paul W. S. Anderson is as excited as everyone else to see the upcoming reboot.

“I’m a fan of Mortal Kombat, so I wish them well, and I’m excited to see what they come up with,” Anderson said in a recent interview. “I’m going to show up as a fanboy.”

The original Mortal Kombat movie premiered way back in 1995 and offered a relatively faithful take on the beloved source material. Despite its PG-13 rating, the movie contained all of the high-kicking, fist-throwing action one would expect, though without the brutal and bloody fatalities that the game is well-known for. Anderson’s Mortal Kombat was a commercial, if not critical, success, spending three weeks as the number-one film at the U.S. box office, and earning over $122 million worldwide.

The movie also stands as one of the rare exceptions to the oft-discussed “video game curse”, something that Anderson refuses to buy into. “Lots of books get adapted and the adaptations don’t work, but no one is saying book adaptations are cursed,” Paul W.S. Anderson says.

Whether such a curse exists or not, the upcoming Mortal Kombat reboot will be trying very hard to avoid any backlash from devoted fans. One way in which they hope to achieve this is by doing something that the 1995 movie did not, include fatalities. Actor Lewis Tan, who is set to star in the new Mortal Kombat movie set for release this year, has recently been talking up this element of the adaptation saying, “Let me just say this, there were some days on set that I felt sick. I’m not kidding. They did not… They did not hold back.”

Based on the ridiculously over-the-top violence of fatality moves in Mortal Kombat you would think that they would require a lot of special effects work to complete, but according to producer Todd Garner, they are relying on practical effects, with the movie not needing much CGI at all. “I can say for sure that the fatalities that we’re gonna put into the film are from the game,” Russo said previously. “We’re not going to come up with some new things that we haven’t seen before, but at the same time, if we’re going to do it to use that device, we want to make sure that it’s not just in there just to be in there and have that point to the story,” he explained. “So everything will always have that point to what’s happening in the story, that it will feel awesome and badass, but it’s going to play a role, you know, it’s not just going to be there just to be showy.”

Mortal Kombat is directed by Simon McQuoid from a screenplay by Greg Russo and Dave Callaham and a story by Oren Uziel and Russo. The movie will feature a host of classic characters including Ludi Lin as Liu Kang, Joe Taslim as Sub-Zero, Tadanobu Asano as Raiden, Jessica McNamee as Sonya Blade, and Mehcad Brooks as Jackson “Jax” Briggs. Mortal Kombat is currently still on schedule and is set to premiere in theaters on January 15, 2021. This comes to us from Entertainement Weekly.

Topics: Mortal Kombat, Video Games