The badass two-season web series “Mortal Kombat: Legacy,” developed by Kevin Tancharoen, originated as a short film titled “Mortal Kombat: Rebirth.” That short, which hit the net back in 2010, was penned by Tancharoen and Oren Uziel; and in a new interview that just hit Collider, Uziel has revealed that the project led to him being approached by New Line about rebooting the franchise with a brand new feature film.

Last we heard, James Wan would be producing with Simon McQuoid attached to direct, though we have no idea what’s going on with that whole thing at the moment. But it was Uziel who was first hired to pen an early iteration of that Mortal Kombat reboot, and in the aforementioned interview he spilled the beans about his approach to the material.

“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,” Uziel explained. “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.”

“I know James Wan came on to produce, so that to me was a good sign that maybe things were heating up again, but beyond that I really don’t know the specifics,” he added.

As Uziel explains, even he doesn’t know if New Line is going forward with his vision, or for that matter, any vision at all. We hope to hear more soon.

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First there was Cloverfield. Then there was 10 Cloverfield Lane. This year, director Julius Onah’s God Particle becomes Paramount’s Untitled Cloverfield Movie, hitting theaters in October. Like 10 Cloverfield Lane, the script started out as a totally unrelated project, and it was producer J.J. Abrams who re-tooled it into a “Cloverfield Universe” movie.

But what does that even mean? And how did God Particle become a Cloverfield film?

Writer Oren Uziel just explained to Collider that the so-called “Cloverfield Universe,” in a nutshell, is a way for original sci-fi stories to find audiences, with Abrams serving as a Rod Serling-like presenter:

[God Particle] was written before the expanded Cloverfield universe even existed. Everything fell into place with J.J. [Abrams], Bad Robot, and Paramount. I don’t know exactly when it became a Cloverfield movie, but I suspect in this current market where it’s just harder and harder to market an original movie of any kind, a science-fiction movie in particular… I think everyone just knew if it fits—and it does—into that Cloverfield world, it should, and it can only help.

We rewrote during production, but I’m not sure what it means to be part of the expanded Cloverfield universe, other than knowing what kind of quality and feel you’re gonna get from something that’s coming out of Bad Robot and J.J.

Uziel also explained that the movie is very character-driven:

I guess for me sometimes those movies tend to be more concerned with whatever the obstacle is, and I’m more concerned with the characters’ relationships to each other and that obstacle.

The new Cloverfield film, about a team of astronauts who make a shocking discovery and end up fighting for survival, arrives on October 27, 2017.

Ziyi Zhang, Elizabeth Debicki, Daniel Brühl and Chris O’Dowd star.

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