Prior to the release of the new Mortal Kombat movie, Game Rant had the chance to sit down and chat with its writer, Greg Russo. Russo is a self-proclaimed Mortal Kombat fanatic, and acted as the chief lore repository on set alongside his responsibilities as the writer of the screenplay. He was more than happy to share the details of his creative process, but there were a couple areas of particular interest that we wanted to focus in on.
Mortal Kombat has an expansive lore, with a huge number of games and a story that often tests the boundaries of convolution. We wanted to know how Russo chose what to keep and what to avoid, especially since he had the added challenge of fitting a complete Mortal Kombat story into a single movie. He has suggested that there may be more films to come, but this first movie must nonetheless be able to stand on its own.
At the same time, Russo took the bold step of creating a brand new character to serve as the film's main protagonist, rather than using one of the many existing, and beloved, character that MK has to offer. As such, one of our very first questions was simply, "who is Cole?"
"Cole Young is the brand new protagonist that we're introducing in this film...He is a new combatant, and he's our way into the movie. This is especially true for newer audiences that are going to come and watch this for the first time, not knowing what Mortal Kombat is...Cole is trying to discover what it all means and what his purpose is in all this. He goes on a journey to seek out the combatants we already know to try and figure out what's really happening. Throughout the course of that journey, he discovers the truth about himself. That truth, which you'll see in the film, is something that becomes part of a larger mystery and mythology behind the story."
Often in media that takes place in an over-the-top setting like that of Mortal Kombat, writers will include a character that doesn't know what's going on as a way to introduce new concepts to the audience, and ground the story by including an outsider's perspective. Russo, though, opted to use an entirely new, unknown character to do the job. We wanted to know why he chose to do that, rather than use one of MK's many great characters. It seems like a risky move to ask fans to get used to a new face.
"I think part of that decision, and it was a decision that happened very early on, was that all of the characters that exist in this universe come with their own backstories and personalities...What we found is that if we tried to make this a Liu Kang movie, or a Sonya Blade movie, or a Johnny Cage movie, it ended up just becoming about them. It became less about the team, the ensemble of characters...We wanted it to feel like you're walking into this world and meeting everybody. We wanted everyone to get their own screen time, and for us the way to do that was to bring in a new point of view."
Of course, there are other ways to get around the issues that Russo mentioned, and the use of an unwitting character to introduce audiences to the Mortal Kombat setting could be seen as questionable in today's media landscape, where audiences are used to suspending disbelief for wild and unusual settings. There was more to the decision than just those concerns though, as Russo went on to explain.
"It was also just to try to be original and bring something new to the table. The 95 film exists. There have been many stories that have focused on those original characters being the heroes over and over again. We didn't want it to feel like we were re-telling what has already been told. So I had one big mission for this, which was: 'I’m okay adding something to the mythology. What I’m not okay with is changing what is already there.' That was a big mission statement. We wanted to respect the mythology. When we made one of the existing characters the focal point, we ended up having to manipulate who they were to make it work. Then it started to feel disingenuous. So, the best way to honor the existing mythology and lore, frankly, was to give a new point of view and let the other characters be who they are when we meet them."
One must certainly respect the challenge of trying to do something unique and new, yet also satisfying to long-time fans. Especially with an IP as long-lasting and integral to gaming culture as Mortal Kombat, there are a lot of ideas that have already been tried, and an overwhelming amount of source material to draw from. We asked Russo how much of the story from the MK games up to and including MK11 would be included in this new movie.
"When you look at the timelines of the games and see what they've done, they've retconned it many times, they've gone in different directions, they've literally just started over, they've changed dimensions. It's insane. There would be no feasible way to follow the games' story line and translate it into a film. So what I wanted to do was pull out and extract the elements of the mythology and storyline that are most important and most crucial to what Mortal Kombat is.
You see from the trailer right away that we start in 17th century japan and we meet Hanzo Hasashi and Bi Han back then. If you're a Mortal Kombat fan, you know that one of the most iconic and essential pieces of the mythology is that feud between Hanzo and Bi Han. That's an example of something that is in the stories that I was able to pull out. There's other things as well that I won’t spoil that you'll recognize from the games. Once you extract things like that, the trick becomes developing your own timeline. We want the movie to stand as its own timeline...What we're gonna do is pull out that great story stuff that people love, and then build our own timeline from there moving forward. Ultimately, I’d love to get into a lot of the great story moments from the game, but it just has to make sense for our timeline."
That doesn't mean it was easy to pick and choose what to add and where to add it. Mortal Kombat has so many characters and plotlines that it would be impossible to include them all in a single film, or even a trilogy of films, as Russo suggested he originally planned to write. He was able to give us more insight into how tough it was to make those decisions.
"It's brutal, especially when you love something. That's the hardest thing. When you're a fan and you love the source material, you want to include everything. There's 70-something characters, and I’d love to put them all in, but at the end of the day, my job and the thing I have to serve the most is not my fandom, not the legions of fans who love this, not even the new fans, but the number one thing is that I have to serve the story. The decisions I make as a screenwriter have to be the best ones for this particular story...there were definitely characters and storylines that I love so much, but if I try to jam them into movie one, it would be a huge disservice to them and I’d hurt the film overall. My job is to make those decisions and hope that in success, we'll be able to explore those stories and characters further."
It seems that, once again, Russo is hinting at the possibility of sequel films, contingent on the first one's success. We can only hope that this movie is successful, if only to see the story of Mortal Kombat done justice and to allow more movies to tell the tales of other characters. Whatever the case, we look forward to seeing the Mortal Kombat cast on screen for the first time in decades, and Cole Young alongside them.