Mortal Kombat’s 1995 movie has a watch party on Twitter tonight

Mortal Kombat premiered 25 years ago, and for a good chunk of that time it has been the gold standard among video game movies for combined critical and commercial reception. If you’re a fan, and there are plenty, the game’s makers have a treat for you tonight: A Twitter watch party.

So, at 7 p.m. PDT/10 p.m. EDT, sync your kopy of the klassic, krack open a kold one, and follow along with NetherRealm Studios, which will be live-tweeting the feature film that launched the career of Paul W.S. Anderson (director, about a bajillion Resident Evils).

If you don’t have the film on DVD somewhere, it’s available on Netlflix; or Amazon Prime and YouTube for a $2.99 rental fee.

No word on which developers from NetherRealm are on the kase, but one kan only hope Ed Boon will kome over for some kommentary. He was kredited as Scorpion’s voice in the movie (as he has been in several games and adaptations since the 1992 original).

Mortal Kombat starred Christopher (aka Connor MacLeod) Lambert as Raiden, Linden Ashby as Johnny Cage, Bridgette (Billy Madison) Wilson as Sonya Blade, and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa as Shang Tsung. Tagawa reprised that role as the first character in Mortal Kombat 11’s Kombat Pack DLC.

The movie premiered in August 1995 and was No. 1 in U.S. theaters for three weeks. Critically middling, its 58/100 on Metacritic is still the best score for a video game adaptation with that aggregator (beating last year’s Pokémon Detective Pikachu at 53). Its 47 percent score with Rotten Tomatoes’ critics’ panel is still far behind both Detective Pikachu (69 percent fresh, nice) and this year’s Sonic the Hedgehog (64 percent). Mortal Kombat’s $122 million box office haul (against an $18 million budget) since has been repeatedly overtaken, by about a bajillion Resident Evils.

The game is due for a reboot adaptation in March 2021, and its screenwriter promises it will have an R rating, meaning the series’ signature fatalities will be making their silver screen debut.

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