Get ready to choose your fighter! Warner Brothers has released the first official trailer for their reboot of Mortal Kombat. To give viewers a sense of just how faithful the movie is to the game, it’s a red-band trailer, and not for the squeamish. The video is not embeddable from YouTube due to content restrictions, but it can be viewed on the movie’s social media accounts:
Get over here! Watch the trailer for Mortal Kombat now — in theaters and streaming exclusively on HBO Max April 16. #MortalKombatMovie pic.twitter.com/eFhQhbdNUl
— Mortal Kombat Movie (@MKMovie) February 18, 2021
Along with the trailer, the studio has also released a new poster for the movie:
The new Mortal Kombat film is based on the 1992 video game of the same name. The franchise has released dozens of games in the nearly twenty years since its debut, and has spawned comics, novels, and even a live-action TV series. Two Mortal Kombat films were released in the mid-’90s as well.
I’ve never played the original game or seen the previous Mortal Kombat movies, but I know enough to know that this trailer looks like it has everything. All your favorites are there: Ice Guy, The Hat, Other Hat, TV’s-Jimmy-Olsen-with-metal-arms, Sonya, and Other Ice Guy, among many others. I don’t know how much story there was to the original game, but the trailer seems to set it up as a pretty basic tournament, though with some magical destiny thrown in for one of the fighters, who has a dragon birthmark that one of the other characters says he’s had since birth, which is technically how birthmarks work, so well done, you.
Whatever’s going on, it looks like a lot of fun, and it also gave me an excuse to relisten to the original theme from the game (I may never have played but I know a banger when I hear it). You can listen to it here on a loop for ten hours because why not.
Mortal Kombat arrives in theaters and on HBO Max on Friday, April 16th.
