Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (1997) – What Happened to This Video Game Movie?
By the mid-90s, Mortal Kombat hysteria had already taken the world by storm. But when 1995’s techno blaring karate party hit the big screen and became one of the best video game adaptations ever? It reached an all new level of frenzy. The Mortal Kombat official website became one of the top ten most visited sites on the internet. Over 300 unofficial fan pages were created with most of them excitedly discussing the sequel. Kids like me were doing literal karate in the garage with our friends for hours blaring the soundtrack that had just reached number 10 on the Billboard Top 200. All before we retired for the night to eat pizza and play more Mortal Kombat on our Super Nintendos and Sega Genesis consoles. Producer Lawrence Kasanoff used their even further growing popularity to proudly announce a sequel that would best 1995’s Mortal Kombat in every way. Bigger fights, better special effects, and more of our favorite characters from the games than ever you could ever imagine. In reality, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation would end up as one of the most disappointing films of all time. Right next to the Batman and Robins & Street Fighters of the world.
Today’s mystic and mythical journey to a nether-realm called Disappointments-ville will tell the story of a production that was far too impatient for its own good. That replaced fan favorite actors quicker than you can say “Toasty!” and eventually display an obviously incomplete film shamelessly across theater screens worldwide. This is the story of how a franchise took all the hype and goodwill the world could offer and crashed it through the floor, level after level, until it suffered a staggering 79% week two box office drop. Killing an explosive feature film franchise for more than twenty years. Get over here! And let’s find out what happened to Mortal Kombat: Annihilation.
The screenplay for Annihilation is credited to Brent Friedman and Bryce Zabel based on a story conjured by Producer Lawrence Kasanoff, John Tobias, and Joshua Wexler. But according to those two, most of the direction of the film was already set in stone before they ever showed up. Friedman recalled that their job was simply to refine what Threshold Entertainment already had planned and pitch it to New Line Cinema.
Meanwhile, Mortal Kombat and eventual Resident Evil director Paul W. S. Anderson was being courted for an obvious return to the directors chair. He declined and instead went on to make his magnum opus Event Horizon. Anderson politely said that he felt like he had accomplished everything he’d set out to with the first film. In truth, he also just didn’t want to deal with Lawrence Kasanoff again after his experience butting heads with the Producer in the past. In what would be a recurring theme in this story, Kasanoff didn’t look for a replacement and instead decided to promote from within. He promoted Mortal Kombat director of photography, John Leonetti, to director. Which is not to say that was a bad choice. Anderson himself credits Leonetti with being instrumental to the first film’s success and guiding him through his first big Hollywood studio production. What may have been a mistake, however, is Kasanoff continuing to promote position after position in an effort to replace important specialty crew members. It’s always nice to reward the people who got you there, sure. But in this case it led to a lot of people in positions they didn’t necessarily have the experience for on a big budget studio production promising to blow the previous film away. Especially when the studio had a hard release date deadline and no patience for wiggle room. Even when it came to its main actors.
The only returning actors from Mortal Kombat in Annihilation would be Robin Shou as Liu Kang, Talisa Soto as Kitana, and Keith Cooke. Who wasn’t even playing the same character, swapping Reptile for Sub-Zero. Christopher Lambert couldn’t or wouldn’t return as Raiden due to scheduling conflicts and a script he wasn’t enthusiastic about. Johnny Cage was out when Linden Ashby was also unimpressed with the script and unhappy that he felt like his contractual sequel contract hadn’t been honored appropriately. Same story for our Sonya Blade and badass Bridgette Wilson. How are you gonna let Veronica Vaughn walk and expect to just replace her, man? Not that newcomer Sandra Hess didn’t give it her all.
Oh well, at least we have a new Johnny Cage in Chris Conrad. Wait, did they just kill Johnny Cage in the first ten minutes of the film? They just snapped Johnny Cage’s neck like he was a Grand Theft Auto NPC working the check out counter at a Piggly Wiggly. A move that Kasanoff later defended as a Game of Thrones type twist. Thanks, pal. But don’t touch the glasses.
A litany of new cast members were introduced such as Lynn Red Williams as Jax and the more than capable James Remar did his best to fill Raiden’s straw hat. Christopher Lambert is a distinct personality that’s hard to replace. But Remar’s charismatic performance was a rare highlight for Annihilation. Even as they turned him mortal and gave him a Slim Shady hair dew. Cobra’s scary ass bad guy, Brian Thompson, played Shao Kahn with an intimidating edge, alongside a litany of bad guys from Sindel to Sheeva and the absolutely ridiculous looking Motaro. Prolific stunt performer J.J. Perry would have to pull triple duty on the production as Cyrax, Noob Saibot, and even Scorpion when Chris Casamassa left to work on the previously mentioned Batman & Robin. There were so many characters added to the script that we don’t have time to do them justice in this video, much like the production had no chance of giving them their fair shake of screen time in the film. Notable performers Ray Park (later to portray Darth Maul in the Star Wars franchise) and Tony Jaa were given early career opportunities that bolstered the stunt performances of the film as well.
The script itself tried hard to cash the checks that the studio’s mouths were writing. Not only was it stuffed with as many characters from the games as possible. But there were countless ambitious action sequences and wildly inconvenient locations. Whereas the first film was mainly filmed in California and Thailand, Annihilation travels to Israel, Jordan, the UK, and back to Thailand.
Multiple famed stories came from the productions lofty travel schedule. The cast and crew were served fresh monkey brains while on location in Jordan, a moth had to be surgically removed from the first assistant director’s ear in Bangkok, and a hurricane blew away an entire base camp during an attempt to film in the Welsh copper mine at Parys Mountain. Meanwhile, director John Leonetti was promising the media that even the worst fight sequence in Annihilation was better than any single fight sequence featured in the previous film.
That’s not true in any realm, but it wasn’t due to a lack of trying. With seemingly everyone pulling double duty somewhere, Robin Shou choreographed much of the martial arts action himself when legendary stunt director Pat Johnson was promoted to second unit director. Just one of the many dominos of an ever shifting crew. Visual effects were headed up by industry vets Chuck Comisky of Terminator 2: 3D and Alison Savitch, who worked as a visual effects production supervisor on Terminator 2. It’s hard to understand how a visual effects team this talented produced the film we saw before us. But the entire production was up against impossible deadlines with an over ambitious script and a crew spread across the world working together via early high speed T1 lines. Kasanoff would later admit that the special effects in the film were not complete at the time of release and that the entire thing had been released unfinished. He says that the studio flat out told him they did not care if the film was finished or not. It would release in November of 1997 come hell or high water, no matter how bad it looked. And it looked bad.
The result of this was detrimental across the board. The script was changed and gutted on the regular. Entire scripted set pieces were cut from the film or stripped down to the bolts. Friedman was told to take epic, four page long battles and cut them down to two page fight sequences between two characters. Emotional arcs were completely removed and the entire movie suffered massive casualties to its original vision. Even a possible return of Johnny Cage as a ghost or apparition was cut from the film. Although, that sounds ridiculous in itself.
As promised, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation opened to the masses of excited fans, myself included, on November 21st, 1997. While the first week went as planned and the film took first place at the box office, the word of mouth and critical reception was detrimental. Annihilation’s box office dropped a staggering 79% in its second week. The film, made on a $30 million dollar budget, ended up with a $51 million dollar haul worldwide that was less than half of what the first film achieved. I can say from first hand experience that it was one of the most shocking declines in quality from movie to movie that I’ve ever experienced in my life. From week one to week two, the box office reflected that shocking gap between expectation and reality.
Though an immediate sequel had been previously planned, the disappointment of Annihilation had provided a finisher as strong as any the game has offered over the years. Still, a third film tried to eek its way out of development years later. It was to be titled Mortal Kombat: Devastation and feature the return of Christopher Lambert and Linden Ashby, who both spoke positively about the script. Filming was supposed to begin in 2004 when Hurricane Katrina destroyed proposed filming locations in Louisiana and ongoing legal disputes over the sale of Midway Games and the Mortal Kombat rights to Warner Bros killed the project entirely.
Kasanoff would openly regret not delaying the film by six months to bring back cast members and finish effects. Creators Ed Boon and John Tobias consider Annihilation the low point of the franchise as a whole, as do many fans. The games continued to thrive and the film franchise was finally revived in 2021, with a sequel (finally driven by Johnny Cage) due out this October. The best thing you can say about Mortal Kombat: Annihilation today is that it’s a “spectacle of bad” of sorts. Its memorable in the sense that its so horrible in every way. Giving it somewhat of a distinct cult personality. But its hard to forget walking out of the theater as a twelve year old feeling drunk, even though you didn’t know what the hell that even meant at that time. In many ways it was the kind of fatality you could never forget. Even if you kind of want to. And that, my friends, is what happened to Mortal Kombat: Annihilation.
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