14 DAY TRIAL // Lawrence Kasanoff, who is the owner of Threshold Entertainment, initiated a lawsuit against publisher Midway, which was gone through a bankruptcy process and is not set to be sold to Warner Bros. for the sum of 33 million dollars. Kasanoff is claiming that he is the one who built the Mortal Kombat brand to its current value and that a sale needs to somehow include him.
Threshold is the current holder of the rights for the movie version of Mortal Kombat, and Kasanoff was the one who initially approached Midway, back in 1993, with the concept for the MK world, proposing the creation of a movie, a television series and “other properties” related to it. Apparently, Midway was initially skeptical of the idea and Kasanoff was the one who developed it to its full potential.
The complaint alleges that “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.”
The lawsuit is saying that Mortal Kombat as a franchise is worth around 4 billion dollars and that most of that sum is a direct result of Kasanoff’s actions. So, he argues that the deal between Midway and Warner Bros. should be put on hold because of the interest he has in it. The next step would probably be for Threshold to get a piece of the sale pie or for the company to try and get control of the entirety of the Mortal Kombat franchise, so that its creator can then further develop it.
Ed Boon, the creator of the Mortal Kombat videogames, has already stated that he aims to create a new game in the series, an M-rated one, featuring classic characters and fatalities.