Homelander turns into a bloodthirsty griffin in exclusive “Mortal Kombat 1: Khaos Reigns” animality

"Mortal Kombat" co-creator Ed Boon breaks down the new character reveal.

When the team behind the new video game expansion Mortal Kombat 1: Khaos Reigns sat down to think about an animality for Homelander, they naturally had an eagle in mind. The franchise first introduced animalities in 1995's Mortal Kombat 3 as a unique finishing move that would turn the fighter into an animal in order to rip an opponent apart in typically gruesome fashion, and America's chosen bird of prey felt aligned with the star-spangled supe from Amazon's R-rated series The Boys.

The problem was that Homelander wasn't the only third-party character from a different entertainment property being introduced as a playable figure in the game. Homelander, in the likeness of actor Antony Starr from The Boys, arrived as part of an earlier expansion pack for Mortal Kombat 1 that included Omni-Man from Amazon's Invincible animated drama, as well as DC's Peacemaker in the likeness of John Cena from the Max superhero show. Peacemaker, as fans know, is also closely linked to an eagle, his companion Eagly.

"Through iteration and conversation, it was like, let's make it more unique," Ed Boon, a co-creator of Mortal Kombat and chief creative officer at NetherRealm Studios, tells Entertainment Weekly of Homelander's animality. "It became this griffin, a little bit more interesting than just a regular everyday eagle."

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EW can exclusively reveal the final product. As seen in the video above, Homelander's new animality, coming to the game as part of the Khaos Reigns expansion launching Tuesday, sees the supe transforming into a similarly red-white-and-blue-decked griffin that tears apart its victim before exploding them with laser vision. The other characters are getting animalities, as well: Peacemaker gets the eagle, Omni-Man the Hail Mary kaiju from Invincible, and Johnny Cage becomes a shark.

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According to Boon, animalities were "a dumb idea" that they seriously considered because of a false online rumor that got out of hand. "We had a hidden character called Reptile, which was a very rare appearance," he recalls of the Mortal Kombat 2 addition. "We made him rare enough that we wanted him to be a rumor to some people, but then we wanted [others] to say, 'I swear I saw this green ninja in the game!' Somebody on the internet said, 'I saw somebody turn into an animal and it said 'animality.' It was a lie, but that rumor just persisted. So eventually we said, 'Let's make it a reality.'"

The franchise introduced other third-party characters into games, like Jason Voorhees of Friday the 13th, Freddy Krueger of Nightmare on Elm Street, and comic book antihero Spawn. "Before we were kind of sticking to horror movie stuff, just because you're allowed to cut up Jason and Freddy," Boon says, "but then fortunately enough, an R-rated superhero TV show was created." Starr's Homelander debuted on The Boys when the series launched on Prime Video in 2019, and Boon's team knew that aesthetic would mesh well with Mortal Kombat. "We're happy that it's a big hit so people would actually recognize Homelander and think, how cool would it be to see him fighting Scorpion and Raiden and all that," Boon adds.

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Some other big players to arrive in Mortal Kombat 1: Khaos Reigns post-launch are Ghostface of Scream, the T-1000 of Terminator 2, and Conan the Barbarian. Gamers already got to see Ghostface's fatality finisher. "If you watch the Scream movies, you'll go, 'Oh! That's exactly from the movie,'" Boon says. "We're always trying to make a reference to the original source material that inspired it."

Watch Homelander's animality above. The Mortal Kombat 1: Khaos Reigns expansion pack for Mortal Kombat 1 will be available Tuesday at 11 a.m. ET/8 a.m. PT for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, and PC (Steam and Epic Games Store).

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.