Mortal Kombat Legends: Snow Blind is the third animated film in the series, but it’s not quite like the other two titles. Its setting and setup is wildly different, which its writer and director, Jeremy Adams and Rick Morales, respectively, recently talked about in a recent interview with Senior Gaming Editor Michael Leri. Adams and Morales also touched on topics like Mortal Kombat 11‘s influence, why Kenshi is the protagonist, how Sub-Zero and Scorpion’s relationship echoes Batman and Superman’s, and more.
Michael Leri: What was the impetus to do such a drastic setting shift?
Jeremy Adams: Part of it was that those up high wanted to tell a different Mortal Kombat story. They asked me to just come up with a bunch of different ideas and this is the one that we circled on. I was just pulling from various cutscenes that had happened within the Mortal Kombat universe. And without giving too much away, depending on who you play with, you’re provided with a different outcome for Moral Kombat. And there was this real brief snippet of Kano and we thought, “Oh, this is the one we can tell our story in.” And people at Warner Bros. Animation agreed and so did NetherRealm and so we focused our attention on this pocket version of Moral Kombat to tell this tale.
And as you watch the movie, there are some twists and turns explaining why they’ve been able to do this. By the end, you should know there’s a mechanism by which they can do these sorts of things. And that was really fun just to illuminate another part of the Mortal Kombat‘s universe that casual viewers or players may not know. But one of the things that always struck me after doing Scorpion’s Revenge was just how intense and massive this universe they’ve created in Mortal Kombat is. It really goes everywhere. And of course it has to because they’ve created this massive universe for the video games and they’re wildly successful. So it was just a great way to explore just another piece of Mortal Kombat and explore different characters that maybe people aren’t familiar with.
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Rick Morales: I just wanted to do something different. After the second one was so big with world-ending cosmic craziness and so many characters, I wanted to pare it down a little bit and tell a smaller, more personal story. And so once we decided that we were gonna go that route with it and figured out that it was gonna be focused on Sub-Zero, then the dominoes started to fall. We could set it in a different setting. We could play with a time jump and maybe it’s jarring for the audience at the beginning, but I thought that was the fun of it. You start watching it and Kano shows up and he doesn’t look anything like you’ve ever seen him before and we’re in a different world and there are just all these questions that it raises right off the bat and it doesn’t try and answer them immediately.
So it was intention to pull from Kano’s Mortal Kombat 11 arcade ending?
Adams: Yeah. The way we’ve looked at it is that Mortal Kombat is one of those things that was playing with the multiverse before it was in vogue. There’s a certain amount of freedom when you do a story like that. It’s not constrained to a particular continuity and the expectations that come with it. Because you could do a sequel to Battle of the Realms, but there’s gonna be a lot of expectation on it. And this is like, “No, we can lead to this version of the story and tell a different story,” and still allude to it maybe happening.
Did you have to work backwards from that ending or did you want to put the Kronika stuff in first and then it came to the Kano stuff?
Adams: No, we knew we were trying to tell a story where we had the meta themes about what we wanted to talk about and what it means to have power and restrain that power and not be engaged and not stand up and fight for what you believe in. The Kano thing was really great because it just opened up an avenue. Like if you’re doing an improv game and it’s like, “We need a location.” And it’s like, “Uh … post-apocalyptic wasteland.” It works really well.
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And so my job as a writer and what I tend to like to do in the things that I’ve written in the past, whether it’s Scooby Natural or The Flash, is have meta narratives where I want you to think you’re watching one thing and then I throw up curveballs so that you’re entertained while you’re watching it because we’re such sophisticated watchers right now.
I want people to see the preview and be like, “Kano? He’s a henchman. Why would he be the head of this? That’s stupid.” And then I want to try to convince you it’s not stupid and this is why. That’s why Shang Tsung shows up and does his thing, you’re like, “Shang is the real bad guy.” And it’s like, “Is he?” And then we just keep twisting it along the way to try to unveil more and more layers and more fun. So even when you watch the movie and you see the beginning, you don’t even think about that kunai that’s in a frame in Sub-Zero’s cabin. But at the end when he sticks it in the middle of his farm and lights it on fire, you go, “Oh my goodness. That’s what this is.”
Morales: When we started thinking about what we could do coming off that second film, I felt like the possibilities for the Mortal Kombat universe were pretty wide open in that there are so many different characters to explore, but what is the angle on that? How do you get into that? When you play the video game and you beat it with Reptile, Sonya, or whoever your main character is, you get their ending and it’s different in every game and sometimes it’s more significant to how the world works out than the others.
But whose ending is real? What’s the “actual” ending? In my head, they all exist. It’s a multiverse of endings and all these things actually did happen and it is possible to go back and revisit them or explore them within that context. I just thought that was a fun idea. What if we were in the villain’s ending? What if we were in Kano’s ending?
The Scorpion and Sub-Zero relationship here builds on what happened in Battle of the Realms. How did that come about?
Adams: Sub-Zero and Scorpion obviously go hand-in-hand with each other in a lot of ways and we wanted to restrain that reveal until the very end. It’s kind of the Batman and Superman relationship in a way. It’s like Superman giving Batman kryptonite so if he ever goes out of control, it’s Batman’s job to him out. And this is kind of the same relationship. It’s Sub-Zero realizing his capacity to create mass damage is so big and who could stop him if he needed it? Scorpion. And they have, at this point, a relationship and adventures they’ve done together so he can trust that that guy can be summoned to take care of him if he loses control. It’s an interesting relationship that we hint at and we hint at how they’ve fought many wars previously, so it would make sense that he could trust Scorpion with his life like that.
Why focus on Kenshi here? He’s popular, but he’s not usually a huge character.
Adams: There’s something about the blind swordsman that obviously goes back for ages in the genre. My favorite is Rutgers Hauer’s Blind Fury. There’s something really cool about his design. And when we were kind of putting the story together, we were talking about characters we hadn’t used. And again, I always feel like with these movies, it’s a great way to shine a light on characters that maybe people don’t know.
And Kenshi really stood out and then when you see his moves in the game, they’re so violent. And I knew the story board, Ethan [Spaulding], and Rick [Morales] were gonna have a field day with the violence that could come from a telekinetic sword. But when you actually know his origin story and it’s like, “Wait, what? This is weird. Shang Tsung did what?” All that stuff is baked into the game. And so it seemed to fit seamlessly in this world of this other story that we’re telling. And it was cool because it’s almost like Rocky III.
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Kenshi thinks he’s the best. He has an arrogance about him. And at the moment where somebody shows up in defeats him and uses powers, he’s like, “What was I even doing?” If somebody has power like that and then somebody offers you that power and you foolhardily, because you’re so ego driven, take the power and not realize it’s a trap, it humbles you.
Then you have to rebuild and how do you, in that rebuilding, become the better person, the person that you’re supposed to be? The person that doesn’t just care about his own ego and him being the best. He cares about the wellbeing of others. And that’s such a big part of this movie about the way that Sub-Zero reacts to people and how Kenshi reacts to people. And they both end in the same place in a way. It’s like, “Yes, it’s better to stand up and fight for what’s right, even if that means you’re gonna be maimed and killed or lose control.”
That’s one of the things I hope to do with this. I hope to view Mortal Kombat and try to expand some of those themes because all that work has been done. All these writers and people that put the video game together have made these very elaborate stories and stuff. And if you’re a nerd like me, it gets really annoying when somebody deviates. [laughs] So I am trying to have my cake and eat it, too. I’m trying to put them in the movie and be faithful, but also hopefully help it make sense within the context of the movie.
Morales: Kenshi had such a potentially strong arc to his growth. He starts the film and he’s pretty arrogant. He’s out there looking for a challenge in a way and akin to Kano, except that he’s got some morality to him. But he is self-centered. He is trying to prove he’s the best. And then he has that stripped from him.
The Rocky series is one of my favorites. And I just love it because when you have these heroes and they’re indestructible, that’s not interesting to me. It doesn’t give you the sense that they’re progressing. I like Die Hard and when John McClane is running around and he is getting his feet cut and you’re like, “Man, this is a real guy.” It gives the action a little bit more weight. You start to think like, “Whoa, wait a minute. This character can fail.” In Rocky, he loses. It’s always about getting up trying to recover. That’s how you become a hero. You have to get knocked down.
So how do you pick who dies?
Adams: When we started thinking about the Black Dragon and who those characters are and who are their associates, that made it a lot easier. This is one of the hard things about Mortal Kombat, too, is every character is somebody’s favorite character and unfortunately for Mortal Kombat, a lot of those characters die. [laughs] That’s the virtue of the video game mechanism. You can’t have a Mortal Kombat in which no one dies. That wouldn’t be Mortal Kombat. So having presented that this is a universe that people may die over and over again, it makes it a little easier. We knew Erron Black was gonna be in there because you can’t have a post-apocalyptic wasteland without the Spaghetti Western character.
And then some of the other characters just really lent themselves to the film. They have some affiliation with Black Dragon or Kano and that was an easy way to start pulling those characters in and then characterizing them in a certain way. It was pretty easy to fill out. And then some of the storyboard guys even added a bunch of characters like No Face and stuff. I don’t even know if I wrote that character in. I think they just added them in. But there’s a lot of fodder in Mortal Kombat, so it’s really fun to dig deep and try to find some of that to put in the movie. So it’s not just Henchman A being killed, it’s like, “Oh, we know who that is.”
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With this not really picking up where Battle of the Realms left off, are you looking at this as a serialized universe where like there are multiple threads going on and then they all lead to a certain destination?
Adams: No. I wish that was the case because that would give me some sort of job security for the future. [laughs] I could do that, just like in DC comics, they never thought about infinite earths when they were doing all these comics, but then they were like, “Hey, we could tell a story that would make sense of all these things.” I’m sure we could do that. And we could just look at this cool corner of the Mortal Kombat universe and we could tell a story there that illuminates other pieces of the universe. And that’s how I look at it.
This also opens up a mechanism by which we’re saying that there are many different versions of the ending of Mortal Kombat games. And those are all stories that could be told, which is almost infinite as far, as I’m concerned. And it doesn’t have the weight sometimes of continuity that some do. It would be really cool to be able to do these one-offs and to do a serialized one that follows after Battle of the Realms. But that all depends on how many people buy it instead of pirate it.
Every movie seems to be building away more and more from established canon and you’re going in your own direction a little bit. Was that a conscious choice to move a little bit more away from established canon and do your own thing?
Adams: That was kind of a request more than anything. I think it was like, “Hey, we wanna do something that is not in these other two continuities. We wanna do something to make sure that fans of Mortal Kombat just see a different area of Mortal Kombat.” What’s great about it is you can do this, go another way and then you could come back to the continuity. So it really was a request from on high after Battle of the Realms. Like can we do something that’s not so steeped in continuity and maybe something that’s a little more accessible? Let’s just do a story with characters that fans would know, but people that don’t know can still watch and enjoy.
Morales: For us, it’s about expanding expanding the world. These Mortal Kombat movies can go on literally forever. There’s no reason for them to have to stop. But because of that, that means that there’s a possibility to operate in different genres and timeframes. It doesn’t always have to be about the tournament. There are other stories that can be explored within this world. The tournament is, of course, vastly important. But my interest here with this one was wanting to tell a story that you wouldn’t necessarily see in the games and one they wouldn’t even think to tell.
And let’s see what we can do with that and see if the fanbase could get on board with that instead of just seeing direct adaptations of the games that they’ve played. Part of it is because when you play the games, they do such a good job now telling the story within all the cutscenes, that it’s like, “Well, do we need to retell that?” What they do looks amazing, so it’s like let’s occupy another area.
