The Mortal Kombat video game franchise is coming back to the big screen in a couple years with director Simon McQuoid‘s feature film reboot for New Line and Warner Bros, being produced by James Wan and with Joe Taslim (The Raid, The Night Comes for Us) thus far attached to play Sub-Zero. And this time, the movie will actually be gory and rated “R”!
Speaking with ComicBook.com, writer Greg Russo talks about the tone of the 2021 movie in a new interview, calling the tone game-faithful while also comparing it to Deadpool.
“We wanted to be somewhat truthful with the tone of the game,” Russo told the site. “So if you played the games, there are real stakes, there’s real emotion behind what the characters are going through but at the same time, it’s really fun. I mean Mortal Kombat’s always been very tongue-in-cheek in how it approaches whether it’s kind of over the top violence or just kind of some of the insane story ideas that they come up with. I mean there’s always been this kind of fun nature to it.”
Russo continued, “We looked at the games and then we also were looking at some film comps to compare our tone to. And I think things like Deadpool popped up and we’re like, we really like the tone of that. You know, it’s got some great humor in there, but if you kind of take the humor out of it, it’s got real characters, like really emotional stakes behind what the characters are going through. So that was something that we looked at for the tone of this. It’ll be fun, but it’ll also be obviously real stakes, real characters, real emotion.”
The fight will begin on March 5, 2021. Plot details are under wraps at this time.