When news of a Mortal Kombat reboot was first announced a few years ago it lit fans of the video game series’ imaginations on fire. Though the original feature film adaptation from the mid-90s remains a favorite for some, a new version could tap into the larger elements of the games that were…absent from the old movie. There’s also the matter of on-screen violence as the 1995 movie was not only rated PG-13 but studios and audiences have gotten used to much more gruesome depictions of violence in movies since then, not to mention what Mortal Kombat players have seen in the games. Not only is this violence going to be present in the new movie, it’s a lot to take in.
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Speaking in a new interview with Variety about his work on the film, star Lewis Tan was asked about the presence of the game’s trademark “Fatalities” in the movie, saying: “They’re pretty gruesome. I walked on set one day and I didn’t know what was going on, and I accidentally walked into a post-fatality set and I felt pretty sick to my stomach. [Laughs.] I was like, ‘What the hell is this? What happened here?’ It looked like somebody destroyed a buffet line, but there was no food.”
He added, “(Gore) was one thing for sure that the director was adamant on. He was like, ‘This is going to be hard R. Try not to make it NC-17, but let’s take it all the way up until that point.’ And that’s what we did. But I think he did it really tastefully. He didn’t just try to be super gory and crazy. I’m not into all that, but I think if you’re going to do ‘Mortal Kombat’ correctly, you’ve got to have it.”
Though familiar faces will be present throughout the movie for gamers, Tan plays a new character in the film, Cole Young. Not present in any of the games, it may surprise fans that the filmmakers created a new character for the movie rather than using one of the many fighters in their roster.
“We needed an access point for everybody to come into the game, but not to f-k with any of the canons of the game, not to mess with anybody’s backstory,” producer Todd Garner previously told ComicBook.com about the addition of Tan’s character. “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.”
In the film Tan will star alongside Ludi Lin as Liu Kang, Mehcad Brooks as Jax, Jessica McNamee as Sonya Blade, Hiroyuki Sanada as Scorpion, Josh Lawson as Kano, Tadanobu Asano as Raiden, Joe Taslim as Sub-Zero, Chin Han as Shang Tsung, and Sisi Stringer as Mileena.
The Mortal Kombat reboot is scheduled to release on Friday, April 23rd on both HBO Max and in theaters. You can check out all of our previous coverage of the film right here.
