Threshold Enters Fight For Mortal Kombat IP Rights

[Tim_Static]

Thanks to Pat McCarron @ TRMK for this story and John Vogel’s tweet on Twitter for alerting me.

Game Politics is reporting that Mortal Kombat movie production company Threshold Entertainment is seeking to gain partial ownership rights of some of the Mortal Kombat intellectual property, including film and television rights. Here is an excerpt from their complaint sent to the US Bankrupcy Court.

The Mortal Kombat series, as it stands today, is far more a creation of Threshold and Kasanoff than of Midway. Midway’s creative input was almost entirely limited to the videogames. On their own, the videogames provided only minimal back-story and mythology, and only flat, “stock” characters… Kasanoff and Threshold were responsible for virtually all of the creative input that went into turning the videogame concept into a multimedia enterprise.

This is highly unusual seeing as appears to fans that his company Threshold Entertainment stopped supporting the Mortal Kombat franchise many years ago. Just look at their website MortalKombat.com which hasn’t been updated in over five years, and has no real great content to speak of that could benefit the series. Not to mention they never got around to releasing the fan favorite TV series, Mortal Kombat Conquest on DVD, or even given fans better quality releases of the original movies.

Not to mention the outrageous “flat, stock characters” claim, which can be easily disputed by reading Gamespot’s History of Mortal Kombat (which was co-written by TRMK’s own Jeff Greeson) and almost entirely sourced by the games themselves.

It is likely that this could hold up the Midway sale process which was to wrap in the next few weeks. We personally hope that Threshold loses their claim of ownership rights so a better studio, like Warner Bros. maybe, can properly re-introduce the world to the Mortal Kombat universe via film someday.

This has to be the biggest crock of shit I have ever heard. Think what you want about the MK series, but this it total and utter bullshit.

[Mixah]

Biggest crock I’ve ever heard was video-opera.com… wtf happened to that site? i liked the weekly combotitions… even though there was like… 3…

[_Onslaught]

LMAO, they’ll probably win too.

[Master_Bigode]

I wonder what Ed Boon thinks about what they said…
The movies and the cartoon barely introduced anything “new” to the plot and the character back-stories, from what I remember.

[Rhio2k]

The only good thing to come out of the Mortal Kombat name was Konquest, the 90’s live-action tv show. The games were boring and cheesy, and the movies…well, the movies were better than the games at least. They were entertaining, but the suckage of the games really didn’t make me care too much about the movies. If the games were any good I’d probably have the movies on dvd or some shit.

[Jarv]

I couldn’t give a shit about the rest of the “multimedia franchise”… or the videogames, for that matter, but Midway should keep the IP rights to the videogames they created.

[Tim_Static]

Warner Bros Remains as Sole Bidder for Midway

Thanks again to Pat McCarron for the news. He runs www.TRMK.org
You can find the story here as well.

The LA Times is reporting today motion picture studio Warner Bros. is the sole bidder in the auction sale process of Midway Games. Their original bid of $33 million USD emerged as the only bid that Midway Games got during the bidding process that occurred during the last month, despite many other parties taking a look at the studio.

Next week will be a hearing with the US Bankruptcy Court regarding those parties who are objectifying to the sale of Midway Games. One is Threshold Entertainment, which we covered yesterday, and the other is Vin Diesel’s Tigon Studios which is questioning the sale of the movie rights to the game Wheelman.

Before the deal goes through, the Delaware court overseeing Midway’s bankruptcy will have to resolve complaints by several creditors about the acquisition process. One of those is producer Larry Kasanoff’s Threshold Entertainment, which produced two previous “Mortal Kombat” films and claims it has exclusive big-screen and TV rights to the series. Also objecting to the sales process is Tigon Games, a production company controlled by Vin Diesel, which claims it is owed $200,000 for the star’s work on the recently released game “Wheelman.”

Also of an interesting note is rumors around that Warner Brothers is also looking to purchase game studio Codemasters who is responsible for the Colin McRae Rally series of racing games along with the ever popular Game Genie cheat devices of the 1990s.

The next month is shaping up to be an interesting one, as everything regarding the sale of Midway Games to Warner Brothers will be coming to light. Best of luck to all of our friends at Midway Games, who are currently deep into development of Mortal Kombat 9.

[Ki_Shima]

this is just hot air in order to keep what they want