Mortal Kombat Legacy Is The Web Series Proof Of Concept

Allen: So Mortal Kombat is a really interesting story about the entire eco system. And it’s an interesting story from an IP perspective as well as from a creative perspective as well. The director Kevin Tancharoen, he originally put a short video of Mortal Kombat – a short that he had based on this concept he had of an origins story, a live action origins story. From that you know, there was this concept of creating a web series around this origins story and we saw it as a 10 episode season, a 90-minute film. And that web series was put up, you know, again financed by Warner Brothers and it was put up in our series and, you know, blew up in terms of numbers and had over 50 million views and then recently they announced at Warner Brothers new line that they’re going to make a theatrical motion picture with him as director and his origin story as the basis of that thing.

And so one of the great things about this is it shows this model of short film shown on YouTube drove a bunch of numbers and then it went to the next level which was a web series and then after that it went to a movie, right? So now you’re almost seeing kind of a web process attached to content, right, as opposed to let’s go spend $150 million dollars and pray, right? You can actually – you actually are building an audience while you’re going, right and if people are clamoring now for a Mortal Kombat movie and it’s really the same guy. Same group of actors, same creative person that went from the short to the web series to the movie. And I think that’s a really interesting model from a – for creators to change their careers or enable their careers and they can be from anywhere in the world to do this obviously.

And it’s also a really great model for content creators to creating new IP or driving an older IP like Mortal Kombat back into the mainstream, so I think that’s an interesting story.

And in turns out also that Episode 1 of Mortal Kombat was competitive with the first episode of True Blood and you know, things like Walking Dead and things that are on television. So one of the things that we’re doing is really starting to say is the type of numbers we’re generating are generating numbers that are competitive with the type of demographic programming you see in television in the United States and that’s going to only get bigger because we’re an international brand, right? We release Mortal Kombat everywhere in the world at the same time, right? So there’s a really interesting dynamic in this kind of new wave of programming. New wave of video brand.