Mortal Kombat Movie Nabs Iron Man Editor

Action star Lewis Tan is excited about his upcoming Mortal Kombat adaptation for a few reasons — but one of them is that the film’s editor has plenty of experience dealing with similarly-scoped movies. Without naming names, Tan told ComicBook.com’s Chris Killian that the film is being edited by “the editor of Iron Man, who has done a few other Marvel movies. That’s likely Dan Lebental, who in addition to Iron Man has worked on Iron Man 2, Ant-Man & the Wasp, and the Sony/Marvel Spider-Man movies. He has also tackled some impressive projects outside of the comics realm, with Bad Boys For Life and even Dead Presidents back in the ’90s.

While promoting his new short film, Ji, Tan admitted that he hasn’t yet seen the trailer for Mortal Kombat, and that he isn’t sure when fans will have more of an idea of what’s going on. The pandemic and resultant shutdown of Hollywood has raised a lot of questions.

“Things are up in the air, that’s for sure,” Tan told ComicBook.com. “I know that we’re getting through post-production right now, and the studio is really happy with how it looks and I’m really happy with it, and the director is really happy with it. So, so far all things are firing on all cylinders and looking good, but who knows right now?”

Absent a trailer, Tan said that he has seen scenes from the film when he went in to do ADR (automated dialogue replacement), and “I am just overwhelmed with joy with how it looks.”

“We have aa new editor that came on board, the editor of Iron Man,” Tan told us. “And he’s done a few Marvel films and I think he’s really added a cool touch to it. So I’m pretty excited about that.”

The first live-action adaptation of Mortal Kombat has become known as one of the all-time great “guilty pleasure” movies, but its follow-up, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, wasn’t even so-bad-it’s-good. After years of fan films, quasi-official web videos, and animated movies including the recent Mortal Kombat Legends; Scorpion’s Revenge, the franchise now seems to be eyeing a slickly-produced, smartly-directed adaptation that takes advantage of some of the potential offered by the source material.

Tan, who had a role in the Mortal Kombat X: Generations webseries, heads up a cast that also includes Jessica McNamee, Hiroyuki Sanada, and former Supergirl star Mehcad Brooks.

Mortal Kombat is expected in theaters on January 15.