Mortal Kombat was one of the first video games to get translated onto film, and depending on who you ask, the result wasn’t half bad (that’s not counting the infinitely worse Mortal Kombat: Annihilation). Two decades later, and we are now hearing about the franchise returning to the big screen in the form of a hard reboot. Now, this isn’t new information: an unused script for the reboot was written back in 2011 by Oren Uziel, and talking to Collider during a press tour for his upcoming Netflix film Shimmer Lake, Uziel described the script that he wrote several years back:
“Well, and again I don’t know what remains of this, but I know that it was going to be—it’s almost like if you took The Avengers, or if you took a storyline like that and set it in a sort of hard-R, over-the-top violence and hard-edged world of Mortal Kombat. It was a little bit like that, it was a little bit like a Wanted-type story that brought together a bunch of these characters and just pulled zero punches, and had a tone that was still fun but very dark.”
Given the huge cast of the Mortal Kombat series, it’s not hard to picture an Avengers feel, or even a connected universe. Mortal Kombat has surprisingly deep lore, and that could be fun to explore. Deadpool has shown that audiences are ready for more mature takes on comic book stories, and perhaps that is true for video games as well. Here’s hoping that we see some of his ideas on screen.
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Originally published May 19, 2017. Updated November 25, 2019.
