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Mortal Kombat’s blood-squirting fatalities have always been the main event of the video game series. To fans' disappointment, the first Hollywood adaptation of the game in 1995 decided to go the tamer route with a PG-13 rating and a more campy tone for the Paul W.S. Anderson film. But, that doesn’t look to be a problem in the 2021 version. At all. Simon McQuoid’s Mortal Kombat will apparently be going super aggressive with its violence.
The trailer for the Warner Bros release already made the message clear that there truly will be bloodshed. In case you’re looking for more evidence of the film’s impending onslaught, director Simon McQuoid just said this about Mortal Kombat:
We wanted to push the [blood, gore and fatalities] right to the limit. Obviously, there’s a point where the film becomes unreleasable if you push it too far, and that would be a very unwise return on investment for the studio. But from day one it’s been, ‘Okay, we’re doing this and we’re going to do it properly.'
Yes, Mortal Kombat went there and its director is really hyping it up as a movie that will live up to the kinds of fatalities gamers ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’ in the popular series. According to Simon McQuoid’s recent words to SFX Magazine (per GamesRadar), he even took it a step further with the R-rating than you’d imagine. As he explains, there was a line that they couldn’t cross but they got mighty close to actually crossing it.
Mortal Kombat will hit theaters and HBO Max simultaneously. You can use this link to sign up for the streaming service.
The upcoming movie will feature a breadth of well-known characters from the Mortal Kombat video game franchise, including a number of original characters like Kano, Liu Kang, Scorpion, Sonya Blade and Sub-Zero. Also entering the mix of the tournament of champions will be Jax, Cole Young, Kung Lao, Mileena, Shang Tsung and Goro. Check out the violent trailer for Mortal Kombat below:
To paint a gory picture, Simon McQuoid has said that he saw “drums of blood sitting around” his set during the making of the movie, which took place in South Australia back in late 2019. A new Mortal Kombat adaptation has been in the works for almost 20 years now, with Aquaman and Conjuring producer James Wan finally helping to get it off the ground in 2015.
It’s great to hear the studio understood that there is no Mortal Kombat without its bloody fatalities and fans will be excited to see the updated vision of the video game movie on April 16.
