Original Mortal Kombat Reboot Script Described As Hard-R, Violent Avengers

The new Mortal Kombat movie is still in the oven, and we think that things may be heating up. We know that Warner Bros. has been trying to get a Mortal Kombat reboot off the ground for a while now, and last year concluded with the positive news that James Wan — the imminent Aquaman director — committed to producing the film. Wan is serious about doing this right, and making this a Mortal Kombat movie that fans will love. But what kind of film will it be? According to one of the original writers, this could turn out to be pretty dark and violent.

Collider caught up with Oren Uziel for an interview. Uziel has a long history with this reboot, and penned what ended up being the foundation for the new film. Uziel was originally hired to write a Mortal Kombat film after his debut project gained notoriety, but the project dissipated before it even began. The director reached out to him afterward and persuaded him to continue writing what ended up being the short film Mortal Kombat: Rebirth, which evolved into a Machinima series.

“And it was at that point,” he said in the interview, “that Kevin called and New Line called and said, ‘Hey, you were there at at the beginning, do you wanna come back?’ I said, ‘Sure’, so I wrote them a feature that has been the basis of what the Mortal Kombat movie will be, but it’s been kicking around for a little while now. I know James Wan came on to produce, so that to me was a good sign that maybe things were heating up again…”

As for the script itself, Uziel describes a dark and rowdy romp worthy of the Mortal Kombat name. “Well, and again I don’t know what remains of this, but I know that it was going to be—it’s almost like if you took The Avengers, or if you took a storyline like that and set it in a sort of hard-R, over-the-top violence and hard-edged world of Mortal Kombat. It was a little bit like that, it was a little bit like a Wanted-type story that brought together a bunch of these characters and just pulled zero punches, and had a tone that was still fun but very dark.”

Yeah, we’d pay money to see that. The original Mortal Kombat was fairly dark, but was also fairly mild in its approach. It definitely earned its PG-13 rating with a few curse words and some mild violence, but it wasn’t the Mortal Kombat we were expecting. Hopefully this reboot will capture the spirit of the games more authentically. We’ll update you as soon as we learn more.

(via Collider)