Kevin Tancharoen has had much success with his Machinima web series, Mortal Kombat: Legacy. So much so, in fact, that Warner Bros. gave him the opportunity to work on a brand new Mortal Kombat film (with an estimated budget of $40-50 million), as well as a second season of Mortal Kombat: Legacy. Tancharoen’s story is an amazing one, especially considering the popularity of his original 10-minute film was a complete accident. The short was originally created to demonstrate his tone and style, and was meant to be sent to his agent privately.
“A lot of people think I’m lying when I say this, but it was accidentally published on YouTube,” Tancharoen laughed. “I just wanted to create a private link to get notes from my agent… but it was public. I wasn’t that savvy yet.”
Twitter started buzzing about it; at first, he thought someone else had beat him to creating a Mortal Kombat movie. Then he clicked on it, realised it was his own, and freaked out about the possible legal trouble he was bound to get into. By then, it had already generated 7 million views.
Lance Sloane, who’s been at Warner for 12 years, prefaced here by saying Warner is open and curious about playing with new forms of content and distribution.
“Tancharoen’s video came out,” Sloane recounted. “The piracy people were trying to figure out what to do. But this is the beauty of working with a flexible company: at 9am we watched this film that Kevin posted, and they were gonna go after him. By 4 in the afternoon we wanted to meet with him as a potential director for one of our other projects.”
Warner Bros.’ gaming division was working on a new release of the Mortal Kombat game at the time. They invited Tancharoen in.
“I thought I was gonna walk in, shake everyone’s hand, and get served. It turned out to be a nice surprise!” Tancharoen said.
Warner Bros. quickly canned the other projects they were considering for him, and put resources behind him for “Mortal Kombat: Legacy” on the web.
It’s an amazing and fascinating story, particularly on WB’s side. It’s not every day that a large media corporation changes its mind about a Cease & Desist, and choose to offer a job instead.
Source MIPBlog
