Mortal Kombat Producer Explains Why Cole Young Exists

With iconic fighters like Sub-Zero, Scorpion, and the rest of the Mortal Kombat roster, the new Mortal Kombat movie has no shortage of characters to pick from. But even though all those fan-favorites already existed, a totally new character, Cole Young, has been introduced to the Mortal Kombat universe. Cole Young is played by actor Lewis Tan and is one of the key protagonists in the Mortal Kombat movie, and according to producer Todd Garner, the new character serves as the perfect jumping-on point for people who are new to the Mortal Kombat experience.

ComicBook.com learned more about Tan's character and his place in Mortal Kombat during a set visit for the movie. As those who've dabbled in the Mortal Kombat franchise will know, the stories, characters, and their relationships within can seem pretty dense if you're unfamiliar or even just casually interested. To help solve this problem, people watching the Mortal Kombat reboot can be introduced or reintroduced to all these acclaimed characters through the eyes of Cole Young.

"You know, having made a number of movies in our careers, the worry is when you have such a deep piece of IPs that like a video game that if you get too stuck in just the video game, you can sometimes ignore the rest of the world, and we have to acknowledge that not every single person in the world knows the game," Garner said. "So we needed an access point for everybody to come into the game, but not to fuck with any of the canons of the game, not to mess with anybody's backstory, so that in order to keep everybody pristine and keep the game true, we needed a character to come in and meet all those characters."

Garner continued to say that kind of perspective is exactly what Tan's character is offering. He'll be meeting all these Mortal Kombat icons for the first time to ease people into the experience if it's their first time meeting them as well.

"That's the character Lewis is playing," Garner continued. "He sees the eyes of anyone who's never played the game, just to come in and go, 'Oh, this is Kabal. Oh, this is Kano, oh this is Sonya Blade.' As opposed to just jumping in and having a tournament and just sort of how the '95 movie did it. We felt like that might be a little limiting for people and be a little jarring for people. Kind of in the same way ... I think about Transformers, if you just loved that game, you can't just come in and have a bunch of robots. You have to have somebody coming in and narrating. I use that in air quotes. So that's the character Cole is playing. We're not trying to say he's a new character in the game, he's just used to start introduction into the world of Mortal Kombat."

Mortal Kombat will come to theaters and HBO Max on April 16th.