Monthly Archives: March 2021
Marvel Boss Kevin Feige Denies Chris Evans Will Return as Captain America
The Russo Brothers Directed the Newest Fortnite Trailer
60 Photos From IGN’s Super Nintendo World Visit in Japan
Sony Offering 10 PS4 Games, Including Horizon Zero Dawn, for Free
King of the Hill Returns? Animated Revival Series in ‘Hot Negotiations’
It's unclear whether the revival series would air on Fox or shift to become a streaming exclusive on Hulu or Disney+. Presumably, most of the surviving voice cast would return, including Judge as both Hank Hill and Jeff Boomhauer, Kathy Najimy as Peggy Hill, Johnny Hardwick as Dale Gribble and Stephen Root as Bill Dauterive. However, given the time jump involved, it's possible the role of Hank's son Bobby will be recast. It also remains to be seen how the revival might handle Hank's niece Luanne and her husband Lucky, as voice actors Brittany Murphy and Tom Petty have both passed away.
King of the Hill aired for 13 seasons on Fox between 1997 and 2009, making it one of the most successful animated sitcoms to debut in the wake of The Simpsons. The series follows the mundane day-to-day struggles of the Hill family and the many other eccentric personalities in the fictional town of Arlen, TX. Similar to The Simpsons and Family Guy, the characters in King of the Hill never aged significantly over the course of the series, so the revival will break new ground in that regard. Has Bobby made good on his dream of being a standup comedian? Has Hank been promoted to full manager of Strickland Propane? Is Dale a member of QAnon? These are the burning questions the revival will answer.
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Animated sitcom revivals and reboots are becoming increasingly popular these days, especially with the long-term effects of the pandemic on Hollywood. Hulu recently debuted the first season of its Animaniacs revival series, while HBO Max is developing a Tiny Toon Adventures reboot dubbed Tiny Toons Looniversity. Meanwhile, MTV is renewing tis emphasis on animated projects, ordering two new seasons of Judge's Beavis and Butthead and greenlighting both the Daria reboot Jodie and a new Clone High series.
Let us know which of these many animated sitcom revivals you're most excited to see by voting in our poll, and sound off in the comments below:
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Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter.Disco Elysium: The Final Cut Hits Consoles This Month
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Mortal Kombat Director Tried to Avoid Green Screen as Much as Possible
How Mortal Kombat’s Movie Respects the Game’s Legacy
The history of Mortal Kombat spans nearly three decades, eleven mainline games, and one of the most massive and passionate fanbases in video games. That’s a lot of pressure for the cast and crew of the upcoming Mortal Kombat, but going off of my own viewing of the first 13 minutes of the film, and a recent roundtable interview with director Simon McQuoid and producer Todd Garner, it seems like the cinematic fates of Earthrealm, Outworld, and Netherrealm are in the hands of people who love and understand what makes Mortal Kombat so beloved.
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One of the main things that Mortal Kombat is known for, of course, is its violence. And that’s not something that the movie is shying away from.
“I just wanted to do Mortal Kombat justice,” said McQuoid. “It was about studying and looking at what the fundamental ingredients are to Mortal Kombat. What are the key strands of DNA that make this what it is. So I spent a lot of time thinking about that, so that stylistically it ended up in the right place. One of those [key strands of DNA] is the brutality of it. What I liked about the blood aspect is that we could be authentic. We didn't have to hold back on the fights. If there was a fight going on, someone got stamped through the head, blood probably would burst out the back, and we could do that. New Line deserves a lot of credit because they always wanted to do it justice as well.”
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And sure enough, the extended scene I watched did not pull back on the violence, but it’s also important to note that it was more than just bloodshed. It opens on the Hasashi Compound in the year 1617, where Hanzo Hasashi (Hiroyuki Sanada), the man who will eventually become the yellow clad spectre of vengeance, Scorpion, shares a tender moment with his family before he goes out to collect some water from the river. We get to see a brief bit of the Hasashi family life before it gets torn apart due to the attack of Bi-Han (Joe Taslim) and the Lin Kuei clan.
“There’s a difference between violence for violence’s sake… and violence [that’s] motivated by characters you love and care about and worry about. We’re trying to do that,” said Garner. “We’re trying to make a movie where you care about the people. It’s grounded, it has a realistic tone to it, and the violence comes from the rules of the world we’ve established, but you’re not just trying to make torture porn. You’re trying to do something that is faithful to the IP, but also comes from a motivated and grounded place that is motivated by real characters that feel like they’ve lived real lives up to this moment.”
[ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2021/02/19/mortal-kombat-movie-vs-game-characters-compared"]Once the fighting does begin, that’s when the movie earns its R rating. Hanzo straps a gardening kunai to a rope to form his trademark spear, and starts absolutely tearing through a crowd of Lin Kuei clansmen, at one point piercing clean through a man’s head before yanking him to the ground and ripping the blade out with a healthy spurt of blood erupting from his skull.
One of the most notable aspects about Mortal Kombat’s absolutely enormous roster of characters over the years is the diversity of cultures and martial arts featured within it, from Japanese ninjas to Chinese monks to American special forces and Australian thugs, and casting actors that were not only authentic to that spread of nationalities and cultures, but also could fight, was extremely important to both McQuoid and Garner.“It’s important because it’s the right thing to do. It’s that simple. To make these the best versions of these characters, that’s what we needed to do,” said McQuoid. “The thing about Mortal Kombat is its rich textural mixture of really great things. Many different cultures, and that’s a really important ingredient as we analysed it. It didn’t cross anyone’s mind at any point that we were doing it any other way. Perhaps the guys at New Line are just braver than most. We didn’t even talk about it much because it was like, ‘Obviously, that’s what we’re doing.’ When I talked to New Line for the first time and I could see their respect for it, I was like ‘well, this is great, because this is how I want to do it and how we all want to do it.’ It was easy because it was the right thing to do. It would have been silly to do it any other way.”
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Garner said that the first thing they told Warners out of the gate was that not only was the movie going to be diverse, but that the cast also needed to know how to fight. Action scenes that had to be cut in a way that hides the fact that a stunt double was being used during the fight just wouldn’t work with the kind of movie that they had wanted to make. This shrunk the talent pool considerably, but Garner feels like it was worth it.
“It took a while, and it’s to Simon’s credit, he’s the most patient man, and he did it,” said Garner. “Everyone says that this is a video game movie, and OK, [but] it’s a martial arts movie.”
While video game adaptations certainly have gotten better over the most recent years, there’s certainly a history of disappointing adaptations. McQuoid’s thought on the secret to making a good video game adaptation is simple, but refreshing to hear.
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“The intent was to respect the material. That had to be first and foremost. It was to treat the game structurally like a film. Not to borrow the wrong things from the video game. From what I’ve observed from when video game films don’t do so well, it’s because they don’t respect the material,” said McQuoid. “I have great respect for video games and video game companies and video game characters. There’s a reason people love these video games. They immerse people far better in many cases than movies can. But I think also understanding what a film can give you that a video game can’t to make things totally real. To see Scorpion in full real samurai Japanese-inspired, richly led, richly textured [armor] that matters. And that’s something that we can bring in a film that couldn’t be done in a video game, because it’s not real.”
Mortal Kombat will be released on HBO Max on April 16, 2021.
[poilib element="accentDivider"]Mitchell Saltzman is an editorial producer at IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @JurassicRabbit