The geeks have spoken and Warner Bros. has listened. Remember last summer when Kevin Tancharoen (the guy who did the “Fame” remake that no one cared about and the “Glee” 3D concert movie no one went to go see (how is this dude still getting work?) directed a ridiculous po-faced “Mortal Kombat” promo trailer to try and get traction for a new full-length movie going? Well, apparently enough people with bad taste were impressed because Deadline reports that WB are getting a reboot of the video game movie going. Hooray.
So why is this happening? Apparently, people still care about “Mortal Kombat.” A new version of the game hit this spring and little did we know, Tancharoen directed a 10-part web series for Warner Premiere that apparently did well enough for this to happen (watch it below). Seemingly, unaware that just because something is popular with a pocket of the web (or with geeks) doesn’t mean anybody else will care about it, the powers that be at Warner Bros. are tasking Tancharoen with a new feature. So, who is going to pen this? Oren Uziel. The name won’t be familiar to you, but he wrote the The Black List approved script for “The Kitchen Sink” — a high school set flick with zombies, vampires and aliens — that has Jonah Hill attached to direct. So he certainly has experience mashing up a bunch of mythical type figures into one movie.
Anyway, between this and Lionsgate‘s “Dead Island” (and Screen Gems‘ never-ending “Resident Evil” franchise) it seems there is a revival of sorts for movies based on video games, which at least proves that if Hollywood runs out of ideas, they’ll just recycle old ones. While the promo trailer featured Michael Jai White, Jeri Ryan, Ian Anthony Dale, Lateef Crowder and Matt Mullins, it’s unknown if any of them will be reprising their roles in this new feature, but considering some of them also popped up in the web series it’s pretty likely they will. So just to summarize: the guy who did “Fame” and “Glee 3D” is making a “Mortal Kombat” movie. We can’t wait to see how the fanboys fall all over themselves to justify this one.