Video games and movies hasn't been a particularly good combination in the past. Video games based on movies are generally terrible, yet movies based on video games somehow manages to be even worse.
There are a few exceptions though, and one of them is Mortal Kombat that turned out to be a pretty funny Hong Kong inspired fighting flick. It's okay for what it is. It was a commercial success as well, and grossed $122 million worldwide and was the number one movie in the US for three weeks.
The Hollywood Reporter has made an ambitious piece on this cult classic movie and interviewed almost all the important people from both the production and actors, plus the Mortal Kombat series co-creator Ed Boon to find out how it became a reality.
As it turns out, there are plenty of great stories to be told from a seemingly bumpy production, and amongst the nuggets is that Cameron Diaz was cast as Sonya Blade, and was put in combat training. It was only due to an injury because of this training she had to be replaced by Bridgette Wilson. The movies associate producer Lauri Apelian says:
"We originally had Cameron Diaz cast as Sonya Blade. We were at New Line when The Mask was in postproduction, and Cameron Diaz was not a household name. No one knew her. New Line said, "Why don't you look some of the dailies that are coming in from this film and see what you think of this young, unknown actress." As soon as we saw the dailies from The Mask, there was no question that she was a star. We put her into training, because she had not really done this kind of martial arts work before. She broke her wrist right before shooting to the point where she couldn't do the martial arts stunts we needed."
Check out the full interview to see why Sean Connery turned down the role as Raiden, the insane amount of injuries during the shooting of the martial arts movie, Robin Shou's (Liu Kang) relation to Jackie Chan, why no one wanted to distribute the best selling soundtrack and plenty of other fun stories.