Ricky Church chats with Injustice producer Rick Morales…
Across DC’s vast multiverse of alternate stories on some of their most famous characters, one of the most recent is the hit video game Injustice featuring a Superman who has taken over the world to enforce a long-lasting peace in the wake of a devastating tragedy to him while Batman and a small resistance try stopping him. The game spawned a prequel comic detailing the events leading up to the game, chronicling the death of Lois Lane and the destruction of Metropolis and how Superman and Batman’s friendship was fractured and now a feature-length animated adaptation of the story has been released.
As Injustice hits Blu-ray shelves, we spoke with producer Rick Morales on adapting the game into an animated feature, putting their own spin on Tom Taylor’s prequel comic and the connection and similarities between his work on Mortal Kombat and Injustice, both of which are NetherRealm properties. Check out our interview below…
Ricky Church: Injustice is a pretty popular game and comic book series. What made you want to adapt it into film? What did you think would work about it?
Rick Morales: It was sort of always on the list of films that could possibly be adaptations in the future just because of its overwhelming popularity. I was familiar with it from the video games and playing them. I went back and started dipping into the comic series that was done and within the first couple issues I was like yeah, this could work. I burned through that and it’s just a cool twist on the DC universe. You get to see characters go through things that you might not be able to see them go through in the proper DC universe. I think that’s kind of the appeal to it, showing how things can get twisted.
One of the major things that’s twisted of course is that it focuses on a version of Superman who slowly goes evil after suffering a huge tragedy. What is the appeal of a dark Superman story?
Well, we’ve seen it a lot, right? It’s been done before, but the thing is with this is I never saw Superman as evil. He does horrific things, but they’re all justified in his head up to a certain point. I wanted to make sure that we tried to show that maybe even there’s some people out there that will see what Superman is doing and go “You know what? Yeah, of course that’s the right way to handle it.” Like, he’s gonna rid the world of all the evil, he’s gonna kill The Joker. That’s a great thing. That’s not a bad thing. That would be the reaction to something like this in the real world. that there would be a split. There would be a philosophical split.
I think that is the major point of this film, the split between Batman and Superman. I never approached it as, and I know our director, Matt [Peters], we had a lot of discussions about this. We didn’t want it to be the evil Superman movie. We wanted it to be you can sympathize with what he goes through and breaking him and showing how he could arrive at all the horrible things he’s doing out of a good place, which is usually what evil people do. They think it’s being done for the right reasons so I think that was what we reached for here.
Cool. You kind of mentioned it with the comic series, but most video game adaptations only have the game to go off of to develop something. Injustice is a bit unique because there is that lengthy prequel comic that covers the five-year gap between Superman losing Lois and the start of the game that you can draw from. How did pulling from the comic affect your process adapting Injustice?
Well, it gave us our start point, but I think you’re right to say Injustice is an interesting project because it’s a game adapted from comic books and then comic books adapted from a game now making a movie adapted from a comic book adapted from a game!
But we definitely looked at the comic books almost entirely because we were sort of telling that story. This is not a direct adaptation of the video games necessarily, but it is an adaptation of all that stuff. If you read the comic book series and you’re familiar with some of those story beats, you’re going to see a lot of that in this. As far as the video game, that sets up everything that happens in this film. It was interesting. We were trying to take certain moments from the video game and certain moments from the comic books and make sure that it was all represented and also looking at the video games for design cues on the characters. They have such cool, modern, unique takes on them in the games.
It’s funny you mention looking at design cues from the games because one fun thing for me watching Injustice was the use of several of the game’s moves and knockouts in the animation. When you developed the fights, did that help to have a sort of blueprint for the animation?
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. In the Mortal Kombat films that we’ve done we’re always trying to find those signature moves and incorporate them. It’s the same deal here, we’re trying to find what can work, can we do this Superman special here or whatever, but we did try to incorporate that stuff. We do look at the video game and I played them, I’m very familiar with one and two. It was just a lot of fun to be able to reach into that and have such a wealth of reference that we can pull from.
Now, you just mentioned your Mortal Kombat work, the most recent being Battle of the Realms which we spoke about as well. How did you bounce from one NetherRealm project to the next as they are producers of the Injustice games?
Yeah, in my head it made a lot of sense to do both. There was overlap in these films so there was a point where we were working on both simultaneously in different stages of production. I look at them as sort of sister projects in a way. If there was one whole universe, they might inhabit that in my mind, only in my mind. That’s why visually design wise, they have a similar feel to them, right? To me this is the NetherRealm umbrella and because it’s NetherRealm we’re very familiar with their stuff and how to bring that forward and present it.
Like you just said Injustice and Mortal Kombat share similarities in the combat system. For those who don’t play Mortal Kombat, what do you think would make them interested in playing Injustice?
Well, I think it’s all about the characters, right? Superman and Batman are worldwide icons. It’s one of the major benefits that we have in trying to do a film like Injustice. We have all this history of our main characters that we don’t have to develop their backstories because people know them and I don’t think you could make a film if you didn’t know your audience had some preconceived notion about what this world looks like usually. We don’t handhold in this, you just sort of get thrown into it and if you don’t know who Captain Atom is you’ll find out. We’re not in a four-hour film here where we explore every single person’s history and introduce them to you and all that. You just have to sort of jump on board and I know that the audience that’s going to watch Injustice, they’re familiar with the games, they’re familiar with the comic books. I think everybody is familiar with Superman and Batman so we have to take that for granted in order to even just produce this film.
Speaking of Batman and Superman, in most continuities they’re usually such strong allies that it hurts whenever they’re on opposite sides. Injustice is interesting because it flips the roles with Superman being in the dark role and Batman being in the light and having a moral high ground. What are your thoughts on their relationship in this story?
I thought that was the most important relationship in this story. It’s the reason the film exists really. You say that Batman has the moral high ground and that’s arguably true, but I think that there are others that would say not necessarily. Certainly there’s a point in the film where Superman goes completely off the rails and does things that are 100% inexcusable and indefensible, but up until that point, I think a good argument can be made for either side of this disagreement. Superman becomes very authoritarian, but he becomes authoritarian to save people and make them safe, right? As we know, there are a lot of people in this world that would be totally on board with that. I think it’s an interesting sort of philosophical question and that relationship and how they turn against each other, I think that that’s the film. That really is the whole thing.
SEE ALSO: Read our review of Injustice here
Thank you to Rick Morales for speaking with us!
Injustice is now available to own on Blu-ray and digital.
Ricky Church – Follow me on Twitter for more movie news and nerd talk.
