Gamers have enjoyed the bloody fighting game thrills of Mortal Kombat for nearly 30 years, but there have been few feature film adaptations. However, nearly 25 after 1997's Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, producers James Wan and Todd Garner have teamed up with filmmaker Simon McQuoid to helm a new feature film adaptation of Mortal Kombat, which will see the franchise's iconic characters fighting for the fate of their respective worlds.
In a roundtable interview attended by CBR, Garner spoke about why the new film leads hard into the R-rated possibilities rather than pursuing a PG-13 rating like its predecessors, what made McQuoid the right filmmaker for the project and his hopes for a full-on franchise beyond the movie.
"I just couldn't see a world where this was PG-13. It just didn't feel right. It didn't feel authentic," Garner said of the heightened violence in the new Mortal Kombat. "The R rating, the diverse cast, hiring martial artists, telling the story in an authentic way all led to the decisions that we made, which Warner Bros. was so brave to let us do. James and I talked about it and were like 'It's got to have an R rating. It's Mortal Kombat!' You see these fatalities in the game; it's lightyears ahead of what we could do with the MPAA, but this is the expectation that's been built into the fanbase.
While Warner Bros. was always on board with a diverse cast, Garner credited the success of films like Crazy Rich Asians and Black Panther in helping reaffirm audiences were ready for major Hollywood films featuring diverse casts. "It's [a] diverse world," he explained. "There's not that many white characters, so you've got to be true to the canon; you can't shortchange the characters in terms of ethnicity and who they are. We started from that place, that was sort of an agreement in the beginning that we made that if we're going to making this, let's do it honestly and do it right or don't do it."
After watching plenty of Asian martial arts films, Garner knew that the fight scenes in Mortal Kombat should be top-notch, recalling that McQuoid was determined to deliver the best fights on-screen that he could, working closely with his actors to live up to that expectation. "CGI blood is complicated because it's so easy and so good to use because it's very hard to get blood to do what you want it to do. You have 26 moves of [choreography] and the blood spatter just drips down like a ketchup pack," Garner noted with a laugh about the film's use of both practical and CG blood.
"Simon, his north star was practical, no CG; he wanted everything in camera, which is why I was going to leave my family for five months and move to [the shooting location] in Adelaide, Australia. Everything was going to be real, we [went] into the middle of the Outback in 110 degree heat and fight the flies because that's what the movie requires. Fight choreography is going to be real, no wires, and as many moves of choreography that can be made in one shot with the camera moving. And then blood is the next thing and how are you going to do Goro? Do you want to have a puppet thing and the torso's this long because the [stuntman] has to look out of his nipples? Some things have to be CG, and when you got a guy getting a spear thrown through his head, it's very hard to get the blood to do what you want."
Garner then explained why certain fan-favorite characters didn't make the cut for this film, saying, "The reason we held back on Johnny Cage is because he's a very egotistical guy. He's a scoundrel, he's funny, he's bigger-than-life...and so is Kano. So are we going to have two guys competing and trying to [be funnier or more egotistical] or do you hold Johnny Cage because, God willing, we're able to do another one?" Acknowledging that Johnny Cage definitely has vocal fans, Garner hoped his omission would build additional demand for a sequel with his inclusion.
Garner continued, "Rain and Reptile? They both cloak and you don't want two cloaking guys; first of all, it's expensive, and second, they do the same thing. You unwind it that way, with people we can see later. There are also characters with such complicated backstories with other characters, you want to give them more service. I want do nine hours [like] WandaVision for this thing: Maybe it's just the monks, Liu Kang and Kung Lao, nine hours of that. There's so much to draw from and we were trying to be intelligent as [we] possibly could to tell a story that you could just come in and sit down and not know what Mortal Kombat is and enjoy it. And love it as much as the guy that's played the game for 30 years and knows everything about everything...there are certain things that I would've loved in the movie but couldn't because of cost, practicality and things like that...our goal and our prayer is that this movie does well enough, sets up enough and is satisfying enough for fans and everybody that we can sit down with the Warner Bros. execs, put a white board up, like [Marvel Studios President] Kevin Feige did, and map out the universe; years and years of this!"
As CBR expressed its own love Liu Kang, Garner noted that there are plenty of other directions he would love to go in potential future projects. "I would love to make a Kabal movie! How about just Jax and Sonya Blade? You could do a whole war movie with them!" The conversation with CBR then turned to how Garner and Wan decided to hire McQuoid to make his feature film directorial debut with Mortal Kombat after a prolific commercial directing career. For Garner, the decision came after working alongside producer Jerry Bruckheimer for approximately a decade following 1995's Crimson Tide, and Bruckheimer's tendency to employ commercial directors for his feature film projects.
"What I learned from [Bruckheimer] is there are no better shooters than commercial directors," Garner explained. "They shoot more film than anybody. I've worked with Michael Bay, Ridley Scott, Tony Scott, Michael Mann, Simon West and the list goes on of commercial directors. When I say to you a Ridley Scott or Michael Bay film, you know what that looks like because they're not afraid of creating a style. So I'm not afraid of using commercial directors, having trained under Jerry.
"And when I saw Simon's work, he's a great shooter. I didn't know too much about him; I knew he was an adult and a thoughtful, smart guy. And then I saw this Super Bowl spot where it was a Star Wars thing with these little kids running through a Star Wars set and it was action and lightsabers and you come out and it's a children's hospital. And just being able to tell a beautiful story [instead of making it full of cuts], in thirty seconds, of these children being their own heroes and you find out they're in a hospital, I tear up just thinking about it now. And someone who could be that thoughtful of the characters and that patient, I knew he could do this...he set out to make a movie that was epic, that didn't pander and that had a lot of scope and emotion to it and I saw that in a number of his commercials."
Garner didn't take a lot of direct inspiration from the 1995 Mortal Kombat or Annihilation, feeling them both were very much products of their respective time, complete with their more tongue-in-cheek tone. Garner wanted to instead focus on expanding on the diverse cast and staying true to the characters and overall premise. With an R-rating in mind for their more violent film from the outset, Garner didn't have to play to MPAA standards hoping for a possible PG-13 rating while knowing the bounds to avoid an NC-17 rating. "Yes, there's buckets of blood and there's crazy shit that happens in this movie," Garner explained. "We did everything we wanted and they didn't push back because we didn't set out to piss them off."
Directed by Simon McQuoid and produced by James Wan and Todd Garner, Mortal Kombat stars Lewis Tan as Cole Young, Jessica McNamee as Sonya Blade, Josh Lawson as Kano, Tadanobu Asano as Lord Raiden, Mehcad Brooks as Jackson "Jax" Bridges, Ludi Lin as Liu Kang, Chin Han as Shang Tsung, Joe Taslim as Bi-Han and Sub-Zero, Hiroyuki Sanada as Hanzo Hasashi and Scorpion, Max Huang as Kung Lao, Sisi Stringer as Mileena, Matilda Kimber as Emily Young and Laura Brent as Allison Young. The film arrives in theaters and on HBO Max April 16.