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.)
Sub-Zero?
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:
Toasty......
I want a good game, and a good movie. So I'd welcome either of the ideas openly as changing either of the series would be the only way to have it sell well. I think it would be a great idea for a movie to make it somewhat realistic as it looks like they are doing. With a teaser such as this it could be grabbing the attention of the people who actually care about a Mortal Kombat movie before grabbing the attention of people who just want to see an action flick.
Though you're right about the film industry probably catching wind of this quite a while ago if it was a movie.
I'm not even a big MK fan, and I was very impressed. Anything can look good when it's in small doses. The question is whether it can be entertaining and well-made for the entire 90 minutes.
I still think Jeff was on some kind of illicit drug when he gave MKvsDC a perfect score. That gameplay engine had potential but the timing was way too damn strict and not enough moves cancelled into each other.
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?t=69054&page=7&pp=15
Mortal Kombat is my favorite franchise and this is what it needed...