‘Mortal Kombat’ Producer Todd Garner on Goro’s Return to the Screen; “He’s Extremely Integral to the Plot”

One of the most memorable monsters from the Mortal Kombat franchise is of course the four-armed Goro, first appearing in the original video game and later making the leap to live-action for Paul W.S. Anderson’s Mortal Kombat feature film in 1995. Goro’s big screen debut saw the character impressively brought to the screen using a combination of puppetry and a suit that was worn by creature performer/special effects artist Tom Woodruff Jr. Essentially, Woodruff controlled the character’s lower half, and the puppet served as his upper half.

All these years later, Goro returns to the big screen (and small screen, via HBO Max) in director Simon McQuoid‘s Mortal Kombat next month, but this time around there’s no puppet or creature suit in sight. Rather, the 2021 version of Goro will be a computer-generated monster, one of the only major aspects of the movie that was not executed practically by the team.

In an interview with producer Todd Garner this week, BD’s Meagan Navarro got some insight into Goro’s return, and the approach to bringing him back to the screen in a new era.

“[Simon] fought hard for practical whenever he could,” Garner explains. “So there’s no wires in the fights. There’s no CG in the backgrounds when he can help it. Obviously, Goro isn’t a puppet, it’s CG. But he wanted to do everything real and feel it, and he loved it.”

On the subject of Goro, Garner explains, “He’s extremely integral to the plot. He is a beloved character. He’s awesome. He’s obviously somebody that I would love to have in every movie. He’s also really expensive. Not going to lie. He’s really expensive. So again, if somebody wants to give me a billion dollars to go make a Goro movie, I’ll make a Goro movie. I’ll love that. Every second of him is a lot of money. Every second was like my house. So you got to use him sparingly, you got to be smart about how you use him. It’s not that we don’t love him, it’s not that he’s not hugely important. It’s just practically, he’s so damn expensive.”

“So what we did is we knew that. You know that he’s expensive, you know that he’s beloved, you know he has to be in the movie, and you can’t just have him come in and just… It’s not like Indiana Jones where he comes in with two knives and you shoot him. You can’t do that. That’s no good. We had to figure out a real reason for him to be in the movie,” Garner adds.

Produced by James Wan, Mortal Kombat hits theaters and HBO Max on April 16.