Unlike the other Mortal Kombat movies, the new Mortal Kombat — the one coming to HBO Max — does not shy away from the gore. The Simon McQuoid-directed film is rated R for “strong bloody violence and language throughout, and some crude references.” I have no idea what “crude references” means (“Hey, Sub-Zero, you should try eating zero-calorie subs, tubby”), but I do know that Motion Picture Association of America wasn’t kidding when it called the violence “bloody” and “strong.”
McQuoid told Yahoo! Entertainment that Mortal Kombat even came close to an NC-17 rating. “What we had to be a bit careful of was… you can get to NC-17 territory pretty quick. It’s different in a video game when it’s not real human beings. When you move this across to reality, a different set of things start to happen in your mind, and you get rated slightly differently,” he said. “So there were certain things that are in the game that would mean the film would be unreleasable. And none of us wanted that.”
Will spines be ripped out?
They better.
“So we were balancing that stuff all the time. And there’s some stuff that you will see that really gets quite close to the line because we didn’t want people to go, ‘Meh. Seemed kind of lame.’ … That brutality allowed us to be more authentic because it means we didn’t really have to hold back when someone gets a kunai through the head. There would be blunt splattering out of the back, right?”
Mortal Kombat premieres in theaters and on HBO Max on April 23.
(Via Yahoo! Entertainment)