The upcoming Mortal Kombat movie missed the perfect opportunity to make a clever meta joke with Rain. In an exclusive interview with Screen Rant, director Simon McQuoid revealed that the Mortal Kombat fighter Rain was cut from the film in the early stages of development in favor of a more streamlined story, as Rain's appearance didn't offer a proper balance between budget and relevance to the plot. However, Rain would have made a fun contribution to the movie, and not necessarily by having a significant role.
In the Mortal Kombat video game franchise, Rain is an Edenian prince who can control water and lightning, which make him something of a living storm with the ability to trap other fighters in a water prison, turn his own body into water, and perform powerful fatalities like cutting his opponents into pieces with several bolts of lightning. While it's difficult to tell where Rain's powers end and where those of Raiden and Sub-Zero begin, Rain is a notable fighter in his own right.
Rain's most defining detail, however, is his origin as a red herring. Originally, Mortal Kombat creator Ed Boon created Rain as a joke character. Boon designed him as a prince who dons a purple suit (making him the seventh palette swap of Scorpion and Sub-Zero) and only put him in the game's attract mode - the arcade's "trailer" for the game that played while idle - to prompt players to search for the mysterious "purple Rain". As a big fan of the legendary singer Prince, Ed Boon found a clever way to reference the icon's most famous song.
Instead of cutting the character from the movie, Mortal Kombat should have kept Rain exclusively in the marketing material. Fans of the video game franchise would have gotten a kick out of Rain's absence once they realized he was a red herring again, and the game's first R-rated live-action adaptation would have had many old-school players looking for the Prince-inspired fighter in every scene of the movie like they used to do with the arcade game.
Director Simon McQuoid made a reasonable decision in cutting the Mortal Kombat roster down to its most essential characters. It leaves enough space for the protagonists to have a solid story and develop mysteries such as Cole Young's arc and Scorpion's past, and it also avoids the issues that stemmed from Mortal Kombat: Annihilation's overpopulated cast, which caused the infamous 1997 movie to reduce many characters to cannon fodder.
Including Rain in a few trailers or even a poster, only to leave him out of the actual movie, would have added a layer of meta humor to the Mortal Kombat movie. After all, mysterious characters who only serve to hype up upcoming movies before disappearing are not a new thing. Rain's tease, like in the video games, could have even set up the character's actual debut in an eventual Mortal Kombat sequel.
Everything The Mortal Kombat Trailer Changes From The Games
