Movies & TV / News

Mortal Kombat Producer On Why They Made a New Lead Character For the Film

March 3, 2021 | Posted by Jeremy Thomas
Mortal Kombat Lewis Tan Image Credit: Warner Bros.

Mortal Kombat will introduce a new character unique to the film in its lead role of Cole Young, and producer Todd Garner explained why in a new interview. Cole is played by Lewis Tan in the film, which releases in theaters and on HBO Max on April 16th. Garner discussed the character with ComicBook.com and you can see highlights below:

On why they created Cole for the movie: “You know, having made a number of movies in our careers, the worry is when you have such a deep piece of IPs that like a video game that if you get too stuck in just the video game, you can sometimes ignore the rest of the world, and we have to acknowledge that not every single person in the world knows the game. So we needed an access point for everybody to come into the game, but not to f**k with any of the canons of the game, not to mess with anybody’s backstory, so that in order to keep everybody pristine and keep the game true, we needed a character to come in and meet all those characters.”

On Cole being the eyes of the audience: “That’s the character Lewis is playing. He sees the eyes of anyone who’s never played the game, just to come in and go, ‘Oh, this is Kabal. Oh, this is Kano, oh this is Sonya Blade.’ As opposed to just jumping in and having a tournament and just sort of how the ’95 movie did it. We felt like that might be a little limiting for people and be a little jarring for people. Kind of in the same way … I think about Transformers, if you just loved that game, you can’t just come in and have a bunch of robots. You have to have somebody coming in and narrating. I use that in air quotes. So that’s the character Cole is playing. We’re not trying to say he’s a new character in the game, he’s just used to start introduction into the world of Mortal Kombat.”