There will be blood - MORTAL KOMBAT

How James Wan and Simon McQuoid are putting the backbone back into everyone’s favourite fighting franchise.

It’s gory. It’s brutal. There will definitely be fatalities.” Director Simon McQuoid knows what the fans want, and what they want is a Mortal Kombat movie that isn’t anything like the two that have already been made.

Back in 1992, no one had ever seen a videogame character pull someone’s spine out through their mouth before; it was enough to make Mortal Kombat a household name overnight. The original beat-em-up classic has since spawned 24 sequels, multiple TV series, several comic runs and two live-action movies – both of which most people are more than happy to completely forget about. With a third film stuck in development for almost 25 years, the franchise is finally getting a proper reboot, with James Wan producing a new R-rated fantasy martial arts epic that isn’t afraid to get its hands bloody.

“We’ve spent a lot of time getting the tone right,” says McQuoid, making his feature debut after years spent directing videogame adverts for Sony and Microsoft. “It’s got a lot of grunt, and it’s a lot of fun, but it also has to have an underlying authenticity, a richness. One thing I talked about a lot was this idea of making everything feel very elemental. We’ve got fire, we’ve got lightning, and we’ve got, you know, flying metal hat blades...”