It's too well-made to be a fan project. And if it was for a movie, the film industry's trade press would have surely picked up some word on the project being greenlit already, right?
You're not going to go out and get Michael Jai White, Jeri Ryan, and an effing helicopter for your fan-made fight scene. And you're not going to go into elaborate, gruesome detail on the new origins of Baraka and Reptile if you're making a movie--those characters aren't major enough to build a film tease around, right?
With that in mind, doesn't this movie sort of have to be a teaser trailer for the game we currently know as Mortal Kombat 9?
The video popped up on YouTube, attributed to an account named MortalKombatRebirth. From there, it was picked up by Kotaku, where we spotted it this morning and have been talking about it internally for the past few hours. (Some of that discussion will hit the site in video form later today.)
From here, this looks like a full-on reboot of the Mortal Kombat mythology, and none of the characters shown debuted any later than MK2. I think that means there's a low chance of seeing lame mid-period MK characters like Quan Chi pop up in this, which is sort of automatically a good thing.
A big reboot of the franchise requires something disruptive and a video like this, well-made and slipped out the week before E3, seems to be doing exactly that. Now we'll just have to wait until the show starts and see what pops up.
[UPDATE] Weirdly enough, it looks like this image of the "new" Sub-Zero has been kicking around for over a year now. Reader ZmillA threw up a link to ZBrushCentral, a forum devoted to a "digital sculpting and painting program" called ZBrush. The following image was posted by a user named Food back in March 2009:
