Official Mortal Kombat Thread

Blackfyre

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'MORTAL KOMBAT': WHY COLE YOUNG REPLACES JOHNNY CAGE IN THE 2021 MOVIE
Lastly, one more problem Garner and his team had was the unsavory idea of a white character (like Johnny Cage) being the hero who saves everyone. (Tan is mixed-race Chinese-British.) In Mortal Kombat lore, Johnny Cage is a Hollywood star who enters the tournament to prove he isn’t a pampered, spoiled A-lister. While Cage is rarely the capital-H hero in any given Mortal Kombat game, he is always somewhere near the center bringing levity to the serious stakes.

Garner didn’t confirm the precise whereabouts of Johnny Cage in Mortal Kombat (his name came up a few times during the interview) but his absence thus far suggests the filmmakers are trying something different.

“I feel like if I was getting to make a movie with a diverse cast, it felt weird to have a white actor, literally Johnny Cage, be the hero of the story,” Garner says, adding that these discussions took place at the start of the movie’s pre-production nearly seven years ago “way before Black Lives Matter” and other pushes for diversity across industries including Hollywood.
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Why Johnny Cage Is Not In Mortal Kombat 2021 Explained By Producer
“Johnny Cage is obviously the elephant in the room, and there's a number of reasons why Johnny Cage was problematic in this particular movie out of the gate. One, he's a very big personality, right? He needs his own space. It's very hard to just throw him in a movie, like I said, with Kano. So, taking him out was very easy not only for the movie, but for the sequel. I want to make a sequel, and I've now got Johnny Cage, which hasn't been used in the first one. So, I have a big stick and carrot that maybe they'll let me have a Johnny Cage real presence in the second one"

"Secondarily, when you think about Mortal Kombat, if you just think about like the patina of the movie, it has a very Asian feel to it. And I early on felt uncomfortable having a white male lead kind of lead that charge in the first movie. It just felt Hollywood-ish to me, which is weird because he's an actor, which also was weird. And then it's probably my bias of how it just feels weird if I'm trying to do - and I was - something different and diverse and true. Is it a cop out to all of a sudden have Ryan Reynolds - not him, but you know - as the lead felt a little disingenuous to me. It's super easy to bring him in a big, bombastic, fun way in the second. And he deserves that as a character. I love these characters, so we thought hard about it.”
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Still Benefited

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I kept hoping somehow Liu Kang was gonna steal the show. But then I saw that poster. Jax and Sonya get billing over the man who started this shyt?
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Primetime

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They could just straight up copy the campaign from the games and it'd be better.
 
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