Mortal Kombat Holds A Record No Other Movie Release Could Beat
That number is even more strong considering the competition that Mortal Kombat went up against, including Godzilla vs. Kong, The Suicide Squad, and The Matrix 4.
This article is more than 2 years old
Mortal Kombat was easily one of the most well-received films in recent history amongst gamers. Although the film had not been a critical success, it currently holds an 86% audience rating on RottenTomatoes.com. While that record is certainly impressive, one that captures the attention of studios has come to light. The metrics for the big HBO Max releases of 2021 have been revealed. Since 2020, there has been a plethora of big-name films released on the streaming platform, but none outperformed Mortal Kombat in terms of streaming. Based on households that watched the film for at least five minutes, and accounting for five days of the film being released, Mortal Kombat amassed 3.8 million viewers. That’s a record no other movie has yet to beat.
That number is even more strong considering the competition that Mortal Kombat went up against. In second place among those same metrics is Godzilla vs. Kong, which had 3.6 million viewers. James Gunn’s version of The Suicide Squad is in third with 2.8 million viewers, and then Judas and the Black Messiah only had 653,000 viewers. This is also accounting for the fact that The Matrix: Resurrections and Will Smith’s King Richard were also released but just couldn’t catch up to the rated R experience of fatalities in Mortal Kombat. The simple fact is that fans had been waiting for a more brutal entry into the film adaptation side of things for years. The last film Mortal Kombat: Annihilation was released in 1997, and was essentially laughed at.
The new Mortal Kombat film is exactly what those older films should have been. A multitude of characters, brutal fatalities and killings, and epic fights. That is what the HBO Max version of the film was. That is likely why it was so highly successful on the platform. Now, the film was released in the height of the pandemic so the fact that you could only stream the new chapter at home might have been why its numbers were so high, but it’s also a complete “fan-service” film. Meaning that it ignored a lot of traditional filmmaking practices to deliver a martial arts and gore-filled entry that has clearly been beloved by plenty of fans worldwide.
Further plans for the new franchise are being developed currently and the reported plan is to have them all premiere on HBO Max. That is certainly a smart idea considering how well it did on the platform, and being that HBO Max is currently attempting to create more “in-house” content. What better way than to continue a film franchise that is going to remain successful, at least among fans of Mortal Kombat. Mortal Kombat’s budget was $55 million. Although it only made $42 million domestically, it was able to secure a staggering worldwide gross of $83 million. All those numbers coupled with the numbers on HBO Max are to be considered a success by Warner Bros.
Mortal Kombat is currently streaming on HBO Max, so fans of the video game series would do well to stream the film and see why it has had the best opening in the platform’s history thus far.
