Editorâs note: Hollywood seems to have a penchant for shitty video game adaptations, donât they? But the utter disaster that was a movie like Super Mario Bros. didnât quite scare away movie producers and directors.
When a team of passionate, actual gamers got together, they recognized that someone had to pay attention to the booming success of Mortal Kombat. But they werenât just making a movie out of it. They were building a franchise.
Writer Jamie Russell digs through the history of Hollywoodâs affair with video games in his book, Generation Xbox: How Videogames Invaded Hollywood.
Weâve already highlighted one story to have surfaced from the bookânamely, the story of how Microsoftâs Halo franchise failed in the movie worldâbut this tale brings us back to the earlier days of video game adaptations.
Iâve taken an excerpt from Russellâs book to share that story with you guys. The book itself is a fascinating history lesson into the relationship between Hollywood and video games, and itâs worth a read if you are so enticed.
Generation Xbox: How Videogames Invaded Hollywood
By Jamie Russell
It was during a visit to Midwayâs offices in Chicago, that [producer Larry] Kasanoff saw the companyâs new hot property, the Mortal Kombat coin-op. They took the movie producer down to a local arcade where it was testing off the scale. As kids crowded around the machine, Kasanoff realised they had a hit on their hands. That wasnât news to Midway. But the producer was also convinced it had potential as a movie. Their response? âBullshit! Thereâs no way you can do that. This is an arcade game, thereâs no way you can turn it into a movie.â Kasanoff told them, âI donât just want to just make a movie. I want to make a franchise.â
Despite the huge interest in Mortal Kombatâs success, the reaction was largely one of derision or outright bewilderment. Hollywood, always risk averse, was convinced that videogame movies were the kiss of death after the corrosive impact of Super Mario Bros.. âEveryone was calling me up saying, âWhat are you doing? This is going to ruin your career. This is a videogame, this canât happenâ.â
Videogames were still considered a new phenomenon. The older generation of studio executives simply didnât get it. âMy best story of what it was like back then was the meeting I had after I announced I had the rights to Mortal Kombat,â says the producer. â[One of the studios] said, âThis is great, come right upâ. When I got there, Iâm in a boardroom with millions of people and theyâre going: âThis is fantastic, this is great, youâve got Mortal Kombat, this is wonderfulâŠer, what is it exactly?â I tried to explain to them but nobody even had a Nintendo console to play the game on. So we got a golf cart to drive around the lot until they found the merchandising guy. He had a console. We plug it in, I show them Mortal Kombat on Nintendo [the sanitised, bloodless version]. They looked at it for about 30 seconds, turned to me, stuck out their hands and say: âWell, thanks for coming.'â
Hollywood, always risk averse, was convinced that videogame movies were the kiss of death after the corrosive impact of Super Mario Bros..
âMy philosophy always was: the reason why people fail making movies from videogames is because they try to make movies from videogames,â Kasanoff explains, somewhat gnomically. âI thought: weâre not making a movie based on a videogame, weâre making a movie based on the story that the videogame is based on. The story is the centre of the wheel and the videogame is the extension of one of the spokes.â With a screenplay ready, Kasanoff began to look for a studio.
Kasanoff, who knew [studio] New Line didnât have much else to fill their summer slate with, cut a deal: âThey needed a hit for the summer and because of my track record, they thought, âWhat the hell maybe this is itâ.â Kasanoff agreed to halve his fee but in return heâd keep sequel, merchandising and TV rights. It was a bold move, reminiscent of George Lucasâs deal with Fox on Star Wars. After Mortal Kombat became the franchise that Kasanoff believed it could, he cleaned up. âOnce the movie became a hit, and those rights became enormously valuable, [New Line] were constantly trying to get those rights back from me. I think they were somewhat resentful.â As the screenwriter William Goldman once said, in the movie biz ânobody knows anythingâ. In the grey zone where videogames and movies met, that statement was doubly true.
â[Head of production at New Line] Mike [De Luca] didnât look anything like a studio executive,â recalls [director Paul W.S.] Anderson. âHe had torn jeans, a Black Sabbath T-shirt and you know he just looked like a skater kid. He was the first person I saw in Hollywood who had game consoles in his office. Nowadays you go into any young executiveâs office in Hollywood now they have toys, game systems. Itâs almost de rigueur â like an interior designer puts all these things there when they do the office. Mike really was the first person Iâd met working in Hollywood who had an appreciation of this aspect of youth culture.â
In hiring Anderson, Kasanoff and New Line were taking a big risk. But the feeling was that the project needed someone who could connect the dots to the fan audience. âThere was this belief that videogame movies just didnât work, the idea of adapting videogames into movies was a flawed one,â the director says. âMy feeling was, it wasnât a bad idea. They really were a justifiable intellectual property to adapt into movies. It was just that no one had made a very good movie out of one yet that reflected the game correctly and that was also a movie-going experience that pleased fans as well as non-gamers. Mortal Kombat was probably the first movie to deliver that.â
Throughout 1993, the Mortal Kombat phenomenon had been mentioned in nearly every newspaper in America â even before it joined Night Trap in the dock at the Senate hearings. It was synonymous with everything that was cool, edgy and violent about videogames. Parents and politicians hated it, moral crusaders denounced it. You couldnât buy publicity like that and the kids quickly claimed it as their own. Even though the movie wouldnât arrive until 1995, the brandâs cultural half-life was still strong enough to make most young moviegoersâ Geiger counters click like crickets on speed.
During production, as a courtesy more than anything, [Mortal Kombat creators] [John] Tobias and [Ed] Boon were flown out to visit the set. Kasanoff was keen to get them involved, though he was concerned about the impending culture clash as these Chicago videogame engineers found themselves dazzled by the bright lights of the movie biz. âThereâs always a tendency for people to show up in LA, get an Armani suit, a convertible and a bimbo and boom! theyâve gone Hollywood. Thereâs always a risk that youâre going to lose a percentage of people in doing that,â he says. âBut the thing with John and Ed was that they didnât believe in it. Nobody believed in this movie.â
What did surprise the designers was the deference they were shown. Hollywood has always been good at playing to talentsâ egos and when Tobias and Boon arrived on-set they got the red carpet treatment. âEverybody was very gracious. Even the stuntmen would come up and shake our hands and thank us. What they were thanking us for was us creating the game which ultimately led to them having a job. I wasnât expecting that at all and I got a real sense of what we had created and what it had snowballed into.â
âWeâre not making a movie based on a videogame, weâre making a movie based on the story that the videogame is based on.â
While the collaboration with Midway was smooth sailing, New Line was a different story. âThe reality was that the studio in those days was such a mess,â says Kasanoff. âYou couldnât find anyone. During one of the Mortal Kombat movies Iâm sitting in a teak long boat in the South China Seas [on location] and I get a phone call from the New Line office saying, âYou know, youâre not greenlit yetâŠâ I just hang up the phone and say, âActionâ and nobody bothers to call back until after weâve finished the movie.â
The studioâs haphazard management style was a headache. Executives would disappear for weeks at a time and Kasanoff occasionally had to fight to get his requests met. âYouâd tell them: âI have to fly this guy in from Xianju, China because heâs the best wushu kicker in the worldâ and theyâd look at you like youâre fucking crazy: âWho cares? Just kick somebodyâ. But thatâs not what you do. We took extraordinary care with the martial arts. The biggest tenet of Mortal Kombat is the martial arts.â
The first test screenings confirmed that. Audience feedback suggested there was too much talking, not enough punching. New Line ponied up more money and additional fight scenes were shot. When they ran it again, the reaction tested off the scale. âThe audience couldnât sit still,â remembers Kasanoff. âIt was like they were at a Black Eyed Peas concert. Kids were getting up and fake punching each other in the aisles. Thatâs when I realised it was a hit.â
Even still, Kasanoff claims no one had faith in it, neither at New Line or Midway. Or even in Hollywood generally. âAfter the test screening an executive at New Line said the movie was a piece of shit,â says Kasanoff in his inimitable style. âWhen I finished the movie I took it to Chicago to show Neil Nicastro, who was chief executive of Midway. I said, âYou see, you said I wouldnât do it but here it is.â He sits and watches it. When itâs over, he looks at me and says: âThree out of 10. Piece of shit.'â
Even during the opening weekend, the producer fielded calls from acquaintances telling him his career was over. âBut this is Hollywood, so when it turned out it was a hit, the same people called me up and said âI knew it, I was behind you all the way!'â
Franchising the hell out of these properties became the standard approach. If nothing else, The Wizard had been prescient about the way videogame movies would become an issue of commerce over art. Kasanoff, who had the confidence to secure the Mortal Kombat rights early on, reaped the benefits of this approach. Mortal Kombat cost $20 million to produce and took over $23 million in just its opening weekend in the States. By the end of its theatrical run, Mortal Kombat had grossed $70 million in the US alone and $122 million worldwide.
That was just the tip of the iceberg of what would become a $3 billion cross-media franchise. âItâs a lot more than a movie,â Kasanoff told Cinefantastique magazine in 1995. âItâs an animated video special, a live-action tour that weâre doing, a series of toys and merchandise licenses, a making-of-the-movie book, a novelization of both the movie and, separately, the underlying story. It will one day be a live-action TV show, and an animated series. All that stuff is in the works or has already happened. Mortal Kombat is more than a videogame we turned into a movie. Itâs a phenomenal story we are cross-publishing in every medium that exists. Thatâs what I formed the company [Threshold] to do. Itâs not just a movie, itâs a way of life.â
Taken individually the Mortal Kombat products, with the exception of the original videogame, were largely uninspired. Cumulatively, they were unstoppable. Each property fed off the others, generating heat from its cousinsâ exposure. As a business model it was brilliant. From a fanâs perspective it was like being spoon-fed one pureed Big Mac after another. The success of Mortal Kombat â undeniably a phenomenon â told every Hollywood producer with their eye on a videogame property that the bar didnât have to be set that high. New Line and Midwayâs executives were right: Mortal Kombat the movie was a piece of shit. But with the right Midas Touch even turds could be gold-plated.
