Almost exactly 10 years to this day Warner Brothers acquired Midway, and with it the Mortal Kombat Movie license — but they didn’t exactly have big plans for the film franchise until recently, and that’s because nobody really wants to make R-rated movies. That’s until Deadpool changed the game.
It’s been a big year for Warner Brothers with the announcement of a Wachowski helmed Matrix 4 film starring Keanu Reeves, a hard reset to the DC Extended Universe and now an R-rated Mortal Kombat movie that fans have been begging for, but fans can thank Deadpool for that reboot..
When New Line Cinema released their film adaptation of the hit fighting game, Mortal Kombat, they decided to go a much tamer direction. The movie lacked the most notable thing in about the video-game; the gore. New Line Cinema feared making an R18+ rated movie would mean less tickets sold. This was the general censuses in the film industry and for the longest time nobody released R18+ mainstream films.
Enter Ryan Reynolds. It was always his dream to play his favourite Marvel superhero, Deadpool. But there was only one problem; Deadpool was considered too violent to be a mainstream superhero and the studio didn’t believe it would be successful. Sure, they tried to include some botched up version of Deadpool in the X-Men movie, even starring Ryan Reynolds himself, but it didn’t fly with the fans.
Tim Miller and Ryan Reynolds decided to take matters into their own hands by leaking a some test footage online, and fans absolutely loved it. Fox had no choice but to green-light an R rated superhero movie, and fortunately, and obviously, it paid off. The film was a financial and critical success. It earned almost USD$800 million against a USD$60 million budget. It was also the highest grossing R-rated film, the highest grossing X-Men film, and the ninth highest grossing film of 2016… proving that their is a market for R18+ films.
This has set the stage for other producers and more studios are willing to take a chance on R-rated films. Producers are even calling the Mortal Kombat reboot ‘an R-rated Avengers‘ so it looks like we will final R-rated Mortal Kombat movie we deserve and we owe it all to Deadpool.