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Movies & TV

05th May 2021

Mortal Kombat director on picking the best fatalities from the games to put in his movie

Rory Cashin

If you’ve ever played any of the games, then you already know that these are SPECTACULARLY violent.

“FINISH HIM!”

Or, depending on who you’re fighting, “FINISH HER!”

Anyone with even a passing knowledge of video games will know what those two words mean, and it is bad news for anyone on the receiving end.

Mortal Kombat quickly garnered notoriety for its (at the time) extremely violent fatalities back in 1992, so it came as a bit of a surprise when the 1995 movie adaptation arrived and, for the most part, there were very few fatalities involved.

This wasn’t a mistake that director Simon McQuoid was going to make for the latest adaptation and we were lucky enough to catch up with him in the run-up to the movie’s release.

You can check out our full interview with McQuoid right here:

One of the many topics we discussed throughout the interview was the audience’s absolute love for fatalities and the difficulty of choosing the right ones to bring across to the screen for this adaptation of the game.

Did he have to sit down and go through a menu of all of the finishing moves throughout the decades of the games and see which ones he wanted for his movie?

McQuoid told us the following:

“Greg Russo, the writer, he’d written quite a few of them in already, and then… it is a bit fuzzy now in my memory… but the Kung Lao one, with the hat, I really wanted to make sure… and I think Greg had this one in there… but it was just about this idea of how we… we both really loved this idea of the hat being… almost born out of Kung Lao’s hat and Kung Lao’s character, and the inventiveness of what they do in the game with that hat.

“We really loved that, so we wanted to make sure that the hat itself got a bit of love and got treated with respect and it sort of came out of that. But yeah, we looked at a lot to make sure we were doing them justice and to make sure we were doing the right ones, and really just getting the balance of the set together and making sure.

“We couldn’t have too many, it would’ve pushed it over the limit, so it was just finding that balance, really. And I didn’t want them all to feel same same same type of thing, to get some variation stylistically, so yeah, that was kind of the approach. But Greg was all over that.”

You can also check out our interview with Joe Taslim, aka the new Sub-Zero, right here.

Mortal Kombat will available to watch at home from Thursday, 6 May on most major PVOD platforms (Google Play, Apple TV, Rakuten TV, etc.).

Clip via WB UK & Ireland