Warner was so impressed by the Mortal Kombat: Legacy director’s work, it gave him a whole movie.
Warner Bros. is finally letting director Kevin Tancharoen take the reins on a big screen Mortal Kombat movie. Tancharoen has previously directed two Mortal Kombat projects, the stunning “fan film,” Rebirth, and the web series Legacy.
Kevin Tsujihara, the president of Warner home entertainment, said that rather than just making games out of its movies, Warner – the new owner of the Mortal Kombat brand after Midway’s collapse – wanted to make its game/movie translations a two way street. New Line Cinema – which produced the first two Mortal Kombat movies – will work on the new movie and studio president Toby Emmerich said that the success of Tancharoen’s work on Legacy had inspired Warner to look at rebooting the brand where it hadn’t been considering it in previously.
The movie will apparently be a much more realistic take on the Mortal Kombat franchise, which, considering how good Rebirth was, is not a bad thing at all. According to Emmerich and Tsujihara, Warner is hoping to co-ordinate the release of the movie – which is scheduled to come out in 2013 – with that of a new game version.
If Tancharoen is finally getting to make the movie version of Rebirth – which was originally intended to be a film pitch anyway – then it’s going to make a lot of people very happy. Of course, for people who don’t necessarily spend their time watching fan films on the internet and have only played the games, it might be a little too much of a departure, so I’d be surprised if it’s really the radical overhaul that Rebirth seemed to be.
Source: LA Times