It's no secret that video game movies have had it rough in Hollywood. the good ones are far and few between and even films based on AAA games with big budget backings like Warcraft and Assassin's Creed fail to leave an impression with people. You know what does leave an impression though? Calling your film an R-rated Avengers. This was how writer Oren Uziel described his version of the third Mortal Kombat movie, a project that is only recently getting traction. Years ago, Uziel was the first writer brought on to pen the new Mortal Kombat, and while we might not see this specific version, it's still extremely cool.
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.
Um, sold.
Hollywood has been trying to get a third Mortal Kombat film off the ground for some time now. Oren Uziel was one of the first writers to come on board, penning a version that was something like a hard-R Avengers. Uziel revealed this to Collider, and he can't say for sure that his version was used as the template by future writers or if it was scrapped at some point. The hard-R part certainly makes sense. Mortal Kombat is one of the most violent games out there, and now that we live in a post-Deadpool/Logan world, an R-rated Mortal Kombat movie is certainly within the realm of possibility. It's the Avengers part that should give some clue on what kind of movie this was: a bunch of characters who don't necessarily get along teaming up to stop a singular enemy.
Again, it's unclear if the reboot will follow along with the tracks laid by Oren Uziel, but I really want to see a movie like this. If you'd like an idea of what a Uziel Mortal Kombat film would look like then you're in luck. Uziel wrote a short film for director Kevin Tancharoen as a proof of concept type deal. That short film was Mortal Kombat: Rebirth, which spawned into a digital series on Machinima. Check out the original short below.
The potential is definitely out there for a good Mortal Kombat movie, so hopefully, Warner Bros. can make it work and avoid the pitfalls of other video game movies. There are bound to be more updates, so stay with CinemaBlend for any future Mortal Kombat news.
