A lot of fans are excited for Warner Bros. upcoming reboot of Mortal Kombat. The movie is being produced by James Wan and directed by Simon McQuoid. They are aiming for an R-rating and plan to feature some of the famous fatalities on the big screen for the first time. It was also previously explained that fans will see “a lot of familiar faces” in the film.
The film is currently shooting, and when a fan of the franchise reached out to writer Greg Russo asking about the costumes in the movie, Russo explained that everything he’s seen so far is unreal:
“Forget the fact that I work on this. “If I just stumbled in as a lifelong fan, my jaw would perm be on the floor. What I’ve seen so far is unreal. That goes for weapon design/makeup too.”
Forget the fact that I work on this. If I just stumbled in as a lifelong fan, my jaw would perm be on the floor. What I’ve seen so far is unreal. That goes for weapon design/makeup too.
— Greg Russo (@WriterRusso) September 18, 2019
Of course, the writer of the film is going to want to pump up the movie that he’s worked on, but it still gets me excited to see what he’s seen! I can’t wait to get our first official look at this movie!
As far as the casting for the film goes, Joe Taslim (The Raid) will play Sub Zero, Ludi Lin (Power Rangers) plays Liu Kang, Jessica McNamee (The Meg) plays Sonya Blade, Josh Lawson (Superstore) takes on the role of Kano, Tadanobu Asano (Thor: Ragnarok) will play Raiden, Mehcad Brooks (Supergirl) will be Jackson “Jax” Bridges, Chin Han (The Dark Knight) will play Shang Tsung, Hiroyuki Sanada (The Wolverine) plays Scorpion, Max Huang (Kingsman: The Secret Service stuntman) plays Kung Lao, Sisi Stringer plays Mileena, and Into the Badlands star Lewis Tan is in an unknown role.
When talking about the handling the characters in the film, Russo previously said:
“Yeah. You know the characters are … One of the trickiest things I think with adapting the properties are there are so many characters, right. I mean there are, I think there’s 70 something characters in this and we don’t have the ability to stagger these films like the MCU does, right? We can’t do a Sonya movie and then do a Liu Kang movie. So we’re forced right into Avengers mode off the bat. So when that happens from a story perspective, you’re naturally going to have to juggle a lot of different characters, and you realize very soon that you only have so much room in, what’s hopefully, story one. I mean we only — our mantra as the team behind this movie is always kind of, movie one first, you know, let’s just make that great. Let’s not think about anything else.
“So you only have so much room. And what one of the hardest things has been from a writing standpoint is saying, okay, who makes sense for this first film? And who makes more sense for what would be maybe a subsequent chapter of this world? Because once you really get into it, you realize that… I guess what I should say is, I don’t think anybody wants to turn this into a, actually, let me back up and say this. I think a lesson we learned from Annihilation, the second film, is the more you try to cram into a movie, the more characters you try to cram in, I think they end up just getting lost and they feel like they’re just thrown in for no reason. And that was something that we really wanted to avoid.
“If we’re going to put characters into this, we want to make sure that they had a chance to really be developed, that they’re fleshed out, and that they play a real role in the story. So that’s kind of, in terms of the characters, that was, in terms of the actual choosing of the characters, it’s just gonna be a lot of familiar faces for sure. Everyone, I think most of the characters that you know and love will hopefully will get in there. If a character is not in there, it’s because it was kind of decided that it’s better off saved for a later point where they can actually really shine and be developed appropriately.”
What do you think of the actors who have been cast to play Sonya Blade and Kano? Who do you think Tan is going to be playing in the movie?
Mortal Kombat is set to be released on March 5, 2021.