It looks as though Batman Begins is responsible for starting the latest lame Hollywood trend: Franchise reboots. Pretend the previous movies never happen and make a completely different movie, starting at the beginning. Prequels were bad enough, but for movie fans this should be the final insult. Except it won’t be, and you’ll keep shelling out your money anyway like happy, poorer, little piggies.

So I’m hear to tell you about the next bad idea you’ll be supporting. Moviehole says the long developing next Mortal Kombat movie may be moving forward again, and this time it’s not a prequel, sequel, or a remake. It’s a franchise reboot. Their scooper says it will have absolutely nothing to do with the previous Mortal Kombat movies. Since those weren’t very good, even though the idea of a reboot is pretty annoying, maybe this will be a good thing… assuming of course there’s no way to stop another Mortal Kombat movie from being made at all. At least it’s not Street Fighter.

The reboot’s director (or someone pretending to be him) has apparently been fielding questions on IMDB message boards attached to his personal IMDB page, where he drops a lot of hints. The guy directing it is named “Mink”, and his last project was directing a Steven Seagal movie which no one has ever heard of. Directors with one name make me nervous. Even worse are directors who don’t regularly use capitalization or punctuation, as Mink doesn’t in his IMDB message board posts. Frightening.

In his IMDB postings, Mink reveals that they haven’t started casting yet, but have talked to former MK stars Christopher Lambert and Chris Casamassa about doing it. They’re currently rewriting one of the defunct scripts that’s been hanging about in development hell lo these many years.

Based on the mostly plotless, ultra-violent fighting game of the same name, the first Mortal Kombat hit theaters in 1995 and made an acceptable 70 million dollars domestically. The second one, Mortal Kombat: Annihalation hit in 1997 and made a paltry $35 million, but that hasn’t stopped talk of a third from hanging around in the ten years since then. For more details on what the heck has taken them so long to get a third Mortal Kombat moving, check out Clint’s story.