Watch the Gory First 7 Minutes of Mortal Kombat Online Now

Well, there’s only so many ways you could possibly expect a Mortal Kombat movie to begin, right? It wasn’t particularly likely that 2021’s Mortal Kombat reboot would open with musical number or a love scene. It was always going to be a bloodbath, and that’s exactly what we get in the now available 7-minute opening scene, which Warner Bros. just posted to YouTube. The clip is age-restricted and only viewable on YouTube, hinting at the graphic nature of the R-rated videogame adaptation.

Paul W. S. Anderson’s original 1995 adaptation of Mortal Kombat is a colorfully zany and surprisingly well-executed piece of popcorn entertainment even to this day, featuring awesome practical effects and costuming and superior production design, but Simon McQuoid’s new film certainly seems poised to make a splash with its promise of unabashed action. The film’s focus on a new viewpoint character named Cole Young (Lewis Tan) is somewhat concerning, given all the iconic subject material that the filmmakers had to work with, but all the footage we’ve seen of Mortal Kombat so far makes it look like the kind of adaptation that pulls no punches and makes no attempt to make something like MK family friendly.

In the opening 7 minutes you can watch here, we see tragedy befall the family of Japanese warrior Hanzo Hasashi, better known to videogame fans as the yellow ninja Scorpion. Wielding his trademark kunai on a rope, Hanzo puts on an impressive display of cinematic violence, but the clip ends just before his battle with perennial arch-enemy Bi-Han/Sub-Zero. We’ll just have to wait to see how that fight turns out when Mortal Kombat simultaneously debuts in theaters and on HBO Max this Friday.