Mortal Kombat Writer Compares Tone to Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool

By now, it’s been over 20 years since Mortal Kombat: Annihilation graced theaters and in the land of Hollywood reboots, two decades might as well be a lifetime. In a year and a half — give or take a few months — a Mortal Kombat will hit theaters from New Line Cinemas and so far, it seems like it has a promising start. Aquaman filmmaker James Wan has boarded the project to produce while the script has been penned by Greg Russo, a writer that’s no stranger to adapting video games for the silver screen. This past week, we sat down with Russo to talk all things Mortal Kombat and what fans can expect from the upcoming reboot.

On top of telling ComicBook.com fans could expect game-accurate fatalities in the hard-R film, Russo also compared the tone of the reboot to 20th Century Fox‘s Deadpool franchise starring Ryan Reynolds. When asked what tone fans could expect from the film, the scribe says the team behind to film really gravitated towards the Merc with a Mouth.

“We wanted to be somewhat truthful with the tone of the game,” Russo tells us. “So if you played the games, there are real stakes, there’s real emotion behind what the characters are going through but at the same time, it’s really fun.”

“I mean Mortal Kombat‘s always been very tongue-in-cheek in how it approaches whether it’s kind of over the top violence or just kind of some of the insane story ideas that they come up with. I mean there’s always been this kind of fun nature to it.”

Despite being chock full of humor, the Deadpool franchise, as Russo says, has tremendous amounts of heart and character development in its characters even with the comedy stripped away.

“We looked at the games and then we also were looking at some film comps to compare our tone to,” the writer admits. “Aand I think things like Deadpool popped up and we’re like, we really like the tone of that. You know, it’s got some great humor in there, but if you kind of take the humor out of it, it’s got real characters, like really emotional stakes behind what the characters are going through.”

“So that was something that we looked at for the tone of this. It’ll be fun, but it’ll also be obviously real stakes, real characters, real emotion.”

Mortal Kombat is scheduled to bow March 5, 2021. For more Mortal Kombat reboot coverage, check out more from our interview with Russo here!