The other day it was officially announced by Warner Bros. that the New Line Cinema reboot of the Mortal Kombat film franchise is now coming to theaters and streaming exclusively on HBO Max on April 16, 2021. The martial arts film produced by James Wan‘s Atomic Monster is expected to take a new angle on the franchise which is based on the supernatural fighting tournament arcade video game. It’s the feature directorial debut of Simon McQuoid with a script penned by Greg Russo.
There is an expectation the reboot will land an R-rating as it will involve the brutally violent fatality moves made famous from the video games, the two original movies were PG-13.
The cast consists of Lewis Tan as a new character described as a family man, Ludi Lin as Liu Kang, Hiroyuki Sanada as Scorpion, Chin Han as Shang Tsung, Jessica McNamee as Sonya Blade, Josh Lawson as Kano, Joe Taslim as Sub-Zero, Tadanobu Asano as Raiden, Mehcad Brooks as Jax, and Sisi Stringer as Melina.
The film has been undergoing reshoots with main actors in South Australia at Adelaide Studios and wasn’t going to be ready for it’s previous release date of January 15th, 2021 regardless. They had originally wrapped principal photography back in December 2019 but had to wait until recently to do reshoots because of the pandemic restricting international travel.
Mortal Kombat is part of a controversial announcement from WarnerMedia that they would be adding 17 upcoming films from their 2021 feature film slate to both HBO Max and theaters on the same day.
A trailer is likely coming in the near future.
THE RONIN 