Warner Bros. latest animated project, Mortal Kombat Legends: Battle of the Realms is now available in the UK. The film is a direct followup to last year’s Scorpion’s Revenge and serious ups the ante when it comes to translating the franchise trademark action to the screen.
We recently sat down with the writer of both Mortal Kombat Legends films, Jeremy Adams, to discuss the process of bringing the games to the screen. Here’s what he had to say…
When did you know that you were coming back to write a second film in this this kind of budgeting franchise?
We pretty much knew right away. We didn’t know if [the first movie] would be a success or not but what we wanted to do with both movies was, with the first one, give kind of a flair of like, “hey, this is Mortal Kombat.” Then with the second one, you know, especially for fans, is show how big the universe is.
We haven’t even scratched the surface because I think what team over at Netherrealm has done for, you know, what are the 11 games they have created is build a really intricate and complicated universe. We just tried to distil it down. This is our chance to kind of explore some bigger concepts. And Rick [Morales, producer] was really, you know, really excited about that aspect. He wanted to talk about the Elder Gods, he wanted to talk about the Kamidogu and some of that stuff, and, and so we had to just figure that all out.
How do you go about researching Mortal Kombat lore? Do you lean on thaeteam at Netherrealm to try and help pull some of the different aspects that you can put into the story?
You know this fan base is really very excitable. Luckily there are so many fan Wikis and fan sites that have expertly broken down everything. So it was easy for me to access that information and do my own research. Then what I do is put forward a list of how many characters I want to use or ask what characters we can use. We then check with Netherrealm to see if we can use them. Or can we kill them off? The one sad thing about Mortal Kombat, that’s really hard is every character is somebody’s favourite character. But the paradox is that this is also the most violent game and so people have to die.
How do you balance out all of the action with all of the smaller character moments?
Like I said, some of it was truncated because I really tried to find the little arcs for each character. Part of my mission is like, I don’t want to just have a fight scene with Johnny and somebody random. I want that fight scene to inform Sonia and her, you know, begrudging affection for Johnny. I don’t want Jax to just be in a fight. But we couldn’t do that without Netherrealm. I hope that Mortal Kombat fans will give us a lot of credit for the fact that we just truncated like, I don’t know, like seven games into one movie. You know, we tried to tie it a bunch of plots, like the fact that we have the Elder Gods and the Kamidogu. You know, the fact that we’re talking about Bihan. There’s huge swathes of lore and plot that we try to put together, you know, we maybe our eyes were too big for our stomachs, but we tried.
In our review Neil said the film “is the quintessentially perfect followup to Scorpion’s Revenge. Bigger, bolder and braver in every way it proves why a Mortal Kombat animated franchise deserves to exist.”
Mortal Kombat Legends: Battle of the Realms is directed by Ethan Spaulding (Mortal Kombat Legends: Scorpion’s Revenge, Batman: Assault on Arkham) from a script by Jeremy Adams (Supernatural, Justice Society: World War II) and based on the videogame created by Ed Boon and John Tobias. Rick Morales (Batman: Return of the Caped Crusaders, Batman vs. Two-Face) is Producer. Jim Krieg (Batman: Gotham by Gaslight) is Producer. Executive Producer is Sam Register. Ed Boon (NetherRealm Studios) is Creative Consultant.
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