Friendship

This is barely Paul W.S. Anderson-related, but the extravaganza is winding down. Anderson first came to prominence with the Mortal Kombat movie, which returned its budget several times over. He declined involvement in the sequel, which fared notably less well, making the third a mildly surprising choice for attempting an upcoming theatrical release of Mortal Kombat: Devastation, 13 years after the previous sequel.

The game series is about fifteen years and sixteen titles deep, and a reliable seller, but the franchise is clearly past its glory days, which included an animated prequel to the first film, one season of a 1996 animated TV series (voice talents of Luke Perry, Clancy Brown, Ron Perlman, Olivia d'Abo), one 1998 season plus a single second-season episode of a live-action show (featuring a young Kristanna Loken, whose big break would be T3 before largely disappearing into Uwe Boll videogame adaptations), comic book series, action figures, kollectible kard khallenge, etc.

Film is to be directed by mink [sic], a British comic writer and music video director with a couple poorly regarded action pics (Full Clip, Into the Sun) under his belt. That said, he's now affiliated with Tarantino's A Band Apart production company, so perhaps there's some potential. He posts pretty regularly on the IMDb pages for his films, so you can gather your own impressions.

Just to bring things around, producer Lawrence Kasanoff worked in an exective capacity on Ghoulies III: Ghoulies Go To College.