While speaking to Comicbook (via Adam Barnhardt) during an interview, writer Greg Russo teased that the upcoming Mortal Kombat movie will have “a lot of familiar faces.” However, this doesn’t mean Russo and co. are cramming characters into the movie for the sake of them getting in there like Annihilation did. Rather, if a character appears in the movie, Russo wants the chance to develop said character, flesh them out, and give them an important role. Still, the characters you love will be there, and if they aren’t, it’s because they are being saved for later when they can have more impact and be fleshed out properly.
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“Yeah. You know the characters are … One of the trickiest things I think with adapting the properties are there are so many characters, right,” said Russo.”I mean there are, I think there’s 70 something characters in this and we don’t have the ability to stagger these films like the MCU does, right? We can’t do a Sonya movie and then do a Liu Kang movie. So we’re forced right into Avengers mode off the bat. So when that happens from a story perspective, you’re naturally going to have to juggle a lot of different characters, and you realize very soon that you only have so much room in, what’s hopefully, story one. I mean we only — our mantra as the team behind this movie is always kind of, movie one first, you know, let’s just make that great. Let’s not think about anything else.”
Russo continued, revealing one of the hardest things about penning the movie’s script:
“So you only have so much room. And what one of the hardest things has been from a writing standpoint is saying, okay, who makes sense for this first film? And who makes more sense for what would be maybe a subsequent chapter of this world? Because once you really get into it, you realize that… I guess what I should say is, I don’t think anybody wants to turn this into a, actually, let me back up and say this. I think a lesson we learned from Annihilation, the second film, is the more you try to cram into a movie, the more characters you try to cram in, I think they end up just getting lost and they feel like they’re just thrown in for no reason. And that was something that we really wanted to avoid.”
As alluded to earlier, if Russo and co. are going to put a character in the movie, they want to make sure the character has time to shine. And this makes sense. Every Mortal Kombat character has their fans who want to see more of them, not just an Easter egg.
“If we’re going to put characters into this, we want to make sure that they had a chance to really be developed, that they’re fleshed out, and that they play a real role in the story. So that’s kind of, in terms of the characters, that was, in terms of the actual choosing of the characters, it’s just gonna be a lot of familiar faces for sure. Everyone, I think most of the characters that you know and love will hopefully will get in there. If a character is not in there, it’s because it was kind of decided that it’s better off saved for a later point where they can actually really shine and be developed appropriately.”
Mortal Kombat is set to release on March 5, 2021. For more news, media, and information on the film, click here.
