In an interview with Gamasutra, Kevin Tancharoen shares that theoriginal Mortal Kombat: Rebirth videogot published publicly on Youtube by accident. He had hoped to use the short film to lobby Warner Bros. to sign him on for a new movie:
“It was still in its rough phase, but I couldn’t send a 2GB file over email, so my friend said I could create a private page on YouTube and sent it to him to review. It turns out it wasn’t that private.”
When he saw Mortal Kombat trending on Twitter, he was afraid that someone may have beaten him to the punch. After he realized it was his own short, he got worried about the actors possibly not taking that too well, as “certain rights hadn’t been secured.” Thankfully, they were rathersupportiveof it and the rest is history.
Theupcoming web serieswill span nine episodes, each lasting 7-10 minutes, and will focus on exploring the history of the characters. Tancharoen is working with Ed Boon on the pre-production, and hopes to eventually take the character arcs from the webisodes and then “have them merge together in a big 3D movie.”