Since its release in 1997, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation’s place in the annals of video game adaptation history has calcified into a cautionary tale for what not to do. But there have been a lot of video game movies since then and, as someone who’s witnessed pretty much the entire arc of how these things have been handled and mishandled by Hollywood, I’ve gotta say: What Annihilation lacks in quality, it compensates for with the right instincts for building out a prototypical “cinematic universe,” as we use the term today… instincts which the just-released Mortal Kombat II largely share.
Hollywood spent much of the 1990s workshopping how best to transmute the passion of gamers into box office bucks, and to what degree faithfulness to a game’s mythology is a help and not a hindrance to good cinematic storytelling. Pretty much anyone currently old enough to drive has borne witness to at least part of an epoch of video game movie adaptations which… were figuring some stuff out. But I’d cock one hell of an eyebrow at anyone who tried to argue that the prospects of any given game adaptation haven’t gotten dramatically better over time, to the point where now studios are looking to gaming IP as the next big wave of inspiration for blockbuster moviemaking. That tendency faced a very high-profile test recently with the release of Mortal Kombat II, after Warner Bros. felt compelled to push the film all the way back from its originally-intended Fall 2025 release to kick off their Summer 2026 season.
WB’s decision to tap a video game movie sequel as a crown jewel of their summer season is noteworthy, and a real marker for just how far video game adaptations have come when you consider Mortal Kombat II’s progenitor: 1997’s Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, a movie which is loudly derided and often overlooked for how much it get rights in spirit… if maybe not in execution.
Choose Your Fighter
Let’s do some quick stage-setting of what the video game movie landscape of 1997 was like, and it will be quick… because there had been just three attempts at adapting a game as a film up to that point. 1993’s Super Mario Bros. proved an expensive, tonally challenging first stab that left kids wondering where all their colorful Mario friends were, and adults wondering how much of that hash brownie they really should’ve eaten before heading out for the night. With a way smaller budget and far less sense of how to dramatize a game, 1994’s Double Dragon was even more of a creative and box office bomb. But in December that year, Street Fighter shoryuken’d its way to a much stronger showing on both counts. The Steven E. de Souza-directed movie – the first draft script of which, legend has it, was written in one night – made some weird casting choices, like Jean-Claude Van Damme as the uber-American Guile, but it more faithfully translated the series’ colorful characters and nearly cracked $100 million at the box office. That suggested there was still money on the table for a studio that could find the right franchise to retool for general audiences… and New Line Cinema chose their fighter well with Mortal Kombat.
By that point in the early ’90s, Mortal Kombat was defining gaming’s place not just in pop culture, but in the fabric of American life. Forget about the fact that the hyperviolent fighter was really, really good and absolutely destroying records at the arcades, it was giving lawmakers a bright, bloody scapegoat to blame real world violence on, leaving developer Midway and, by extension, the whole burgeoning industry in the sights of regulatory authorities which aimed to put restrictions on what could be portrayed in a video game in 1993. But it’s still a free country, so the compromise was the creation of the ESRB, the organization that puts that little letter in the corner of your game’s box to tell you what level of objectionable content one should expect therein. And please excuse my millennial tendency to assume your game came with a physical box, I come by it honestly.
Midway had become the Bonnie Raitt of the industry: It sure was giving people somethin’ to talk about.
All of that controversy bred two things for Mortal Kombat as a franchise: for gamers, a clear rallying point around which to extol the creative freedoms of video games as an art form, and for general audiences, the elevation of “Mortal Kombat” to household name status. Midway had become the Bonnie Raitt of the industry: It sure was giving people somethin’ to talk about, most crucially here movie executives like Lawrence Kasanoff, who optioned the franchise in 1993. The next year, up-and-coming director Paul W.S. Anderson was chosen to helm Mortal Kombat based on the success of his indie debut, Shopping. With involvement from Mortal Kombat’s creators, Ed Boon and John Tobias, a reasonable budget, and its simple martial arts tournament narrative hook – which had already proven successful many times over in martial arts classics like Enter the Dragon, The Karate Kid, and Bloodsport – what resulted was a $122 million smash at the global box office, giving audiences around the world a colorful, crunchy dose of escapism and handily snatching the title for highest-grossing video game adaptation up to that point.
Test Your Might
And so, as development on Mortal Kombat: Annihilation began, Lawrence Kasanoff mandated that “more” was to be the guiding ethos of the sequel, as it had been with so many sequels before. That’s not always the right instinct, but in Annihilation’s case, there was so much mythology yet untapped, even with just the first three Mortal Kombat games out there to pull inspiration from, and audiences had seemed very receptive to the fantasy world and larger-than-life, archetypal heroes and villains that populated it.
Unfortunately for Mortal Kombat: Annihilation’s prospects, a lot of the folks who made the first movie special were more interested in pursuing other projects, leaving Robin Shou and Talisa Soto as the only returning actors, reprising their roles of Liu Kang and Kitana respectively. But the true death knell for Mortal Kombat: Annihilation was the exit of Paul W.S. Anderson. Anderson’s style and sensibilities were a great match for Mortal Kombat’s scope, but he chose to pass on directing the film. In fairness to Anderson, though, the movie he chose to make was Event Horizon which, like the first Mortal Kombat, has gone on to enjoy true cult status as a ’90s genre favorite.
John R. Leonetti, the first movie’s cinematographer, was chosen to direct Annihilation shortly thereafter, a choice which made some sense when taken in context with the breakneck pace of Annihilation’s development: Hire a key creative who spent every day working in close collaboration with the director, and hope some of that magic rubbed off onto them. It was, however, Leonetti’s first time directing and that’s a big ask of anyone, especially on a martial arts film with an outsized reliance on visual effects, each of which are specialty disciplines in filmmaking and either of which would give any first-time director a lot to have to deal with.
Mortal Kombat: Annihilation picks up right where the first movie left off: After defeating the sorcerer Shang Tsung and winning Mortal Kombat, the heroes of Earthrealm return to the Temple of Light to celebrate and hug it out, only for Shao Khan, the emperor of Outworld, to show up on their doorstep with a cadre of his colorful and weird generals, all from the recently-released Mortal Kombat 3 game: Motaro, Ermac, Rain, Sheeva, and Sindel.
Look, none of these Spirit Halloween freaks have gone down in cinematic history as super-memorable characters… But what a movie chooses to do in its opening minutes is an important statement of intent for what’s to follow, and leading off with these various and sundry ninjas and humanoid Outworlders doing their little poses at least suggests a world in which disparate races like magic ninja, arms-lady, and man-horse could be compelled whether by ambition or fear to serve a villain like Shao Khan.
Shao Khan breaks the rules of Mortal Kombat, which dictate that Earthrealm should be safe from incursions from Outworld for having won the tournament, by killing Johnny Cage and promising to return in six days to put the rest of the human race under his boot. The rest of the movie follows the heroes’ attempts to prepare for lower-case “a” annihilation at the hands of Shao Khan’s forces, seeking help from new allies like Jax Briggs and Nightwolf, and their inclusion reveals even more shades of this weird world, such as the existence of cyber ninjas like Cyrax and Smoke and the mystical power of “animality,” which seems to be the key to defeating Shao Khan.
Raiden meanwhile entreats the Elder Gods, the deities who rule all the realms, to intervene in Shao Khan’s plot. The aforementioned wave of recasting that crashed into Mortal Kombat: Annihilation is mostly a negative but, with no disrespect to Christopher Lambert, it did yield one improvement: James Remar took on the role of Raiden, and he’s a lovely, warm presence in the film. Remar actually channels Raiden’s affection for the human race, a critical aspect of his character that Lambert’s steelier performance doesn’t really leave room for. In a break from canon, we discover over the course of the movie that Shao Khan and Raiden, the god of lightning and Earthrealm’s team captain, are not only brothers, but the sons of Shinnok, one of the Elder Gods who’s secretly facilitating his son’s attack on Earthrealm to grab power from the rest of the Elder Gods.
Fatality
All of these instincts on the filmmakers’ part to go bigger on the mythology are correct, even if schlocky embellishments like Raiden being the runt of Shinnok’s litter are a little perplexing. Unlike franchises such as the Christopher Reeve-led Superman, which leaned harder into invention in its later sequels to disastrous effect, an earnest effort to more fully represent the creations of Ed Boon and John Tobias on-screen feels like an olive branch to gamers, and because the filmmakers had a chance to totally re-tool the approach going into the sequel, that feels well-intentioned. But, as so often happens when the realities of filmmaking crash against good storytelling, the scope of the spectacle Mortal Kombat: Annihilation required was just not possible with the visual effects available at the time. The mid-to-late 1990s were a trial-by-fire time for computer-generated imagery after James Cameron and Steven Spielberg threw the gauntlet down with Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Jurassic Park, respectively. Studios were trying to match that same level of visual grandeur on significantly lower budgets, and overall, that wasn’t going great.
As the heroes of Earthrealm travel deeper into Outworld, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation’s plot begins to rely more and more on visual effects to the point of cascading disaster. Liu Kang is encouraged by Nightwolf to “find his Animality” in order to defeat Shao Khan, which resolves in a final fight between the two which goes for broke by having each of them turn into martial arts dragons. I’m willing to defend Mortal Kombat: Annihilation’s contributions to video game adaptation history… but that shit sucks.
Annihilation is bursting with poorly-composited dreamscapes that actually do a pretty good job evoking the feel, if maybe not quite the look, of the games.
Annihilation acknowledges the necessity of ending a Mortal Kombat movie with actual mortal combat by having them un-dragon-ify midway through. This all really highlights some of the magic lost from the first movie. You’ll recall that Mortal Kombat ends with an extended one-on-one battle between Liu Kang and Shang Tsung which proves a satisfying finale for two main reasons: The fight was largely performed by Robin Shou and the late Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, and the filmmakers took pains to put Liu Kang’s character arc to the test after he spends the whole movie wrestling with guilt and self-doubt by having the martial arts stop here and there for Shang Tsung to test the might of Liu Kang’s mind. Mortal Kombat II wholly embraces this line of thinking, with dual protagonists Johnny Cage and Kitana each having to overcome demons in their past to go toe-to-toe with Shao Khan and his forces. The Liu Kang / Shang Tsung fight is one of the earliest examples in video game movie history of a character getting a satisfyingly-resolved emotional arc… and the Annihilation finale looks like one of those awful FMV cutscenes from a PS1 game, with the emotional depth to match.
Flawed Victory
Misguided though the heavier use of visual effects was, it can at least be said that they were in service of expanding what was possible in the Moral Kombat movies when it came to representing the games on screen. And for those of us with a soft spot for crappy visual effects as a marker of just how far we’ve come, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation is bursting with poorly-composited dreamscapes that actually do a pretty good job evoking the feel, if maybe not quite the look, of the games.
Mortal Kombat II is a much richer exploration of the game world by comparison. Without skimping on any of the visual splendor or impressive martial arts action, it treats the long history of the games with great care and economy, and innately understands how to shortcut its world-building by leaning into the very same tropes of the fantasy martial arts genre that the first Mortal Kombat game did, going so far as to have Johnny Cage mistake Raiden for a Big Trouble in Little China cosplayer, a direct nod to the original inspiration for the character.
Mortal Kombat: Annihilation’s jabs at dramatizing an inherently silly mythology may not have all landed, but considering how much “world-building” it was doing before the comic book movies of the 2000s on provided a more solid playbook for doing so, they could have been a lot worse. And not to throw Street Fighter under the bus… but, what am I saying – this is a Mortal Kombat article, you’re gonna eat this up – the 2009 movie Street Fighter: Legend of Chun Li ends with Chun-Li performing the most anemic, “20 minutes in Adobe After Effects” Kikoken you could possibly imagine, a far cry from the giant practical explosions of the 1994 film’s finale. The Legend of Chun-Li was released in theaters the same year as Avatar (and from the same studio, no less) and this was their big finale. We just didn’t have it as bad as we thought we did with Annihilation.
Mortal Kombat: Annihilation is not even close to being the worst video game adaptation these days and, hell, it isn’t even the worst video game adaptation with “Annihilation” as its subtitle anymore! That ignominious honor goes to the 2019’s straight-to-video Doom: Annihilation, a movie so bad that developer Bethesda put out a statement distancing themselves from it before it came out.
I think of Mortal Kombat: Annihilation in much the same way as how Star Wars nods to the prequel era in the Obi-Wan Kenobi series. Kenobi comes upon Nax, a downtrodden Clone Trooper who asks the Jedi to spare him some credits. He represents a bygone era which everyone was pretty harsh towards the first go-around but, with hindsight and a lot more variety of experiences to compare against, it feels like we were just a little too mean towards when you consider the new ground it broke and the scattershot quality that was to follow.
So spare Mortal Kombat: Annihilation some credit. It may not have been a flawless victory, but it’s an important link in the chain of game adaptation trial-and-error… at the end of which is Mortal Kombat II, a much better Mortal Kombat sequel and the tip of the spear being launched by Scorpion into fans’ chest cavities everywhere.
