Warner Bros. Discovery recently announced that it’s now considering acquisition offers, which could obviously have major impacts on the future of the Mortal Kombat and Injustice franchises that have been developed by NetherRealm Studios, a subsidiary of Warner Bros. Discovery.
Earlier in the year according to SEScoops (via Push Square), there was a rumor that suggested that Sony was interested in acquiring Warner Bros. assets related to gaming such as Mortal Kombat. This seemed to line up with President and CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery David Zaslav’s recent comments about there being “unsolicited interests” from outside parties about the entire company and individual assets.
In a more recent article, Nikkei (via Push Square again) has reported that these rumors are untrue. Sony CEO Hiroki Totoki was apparently asked about the matter directly.
“Right now, we don’t want to do a big Hollywood M&A deal. We want to build a solid base in our strengths of anime and games.” — Hiroki Totoki
“Right now, we don’t want to do a big Hollywood M&A deal,” said Totoki. “We want to build a solid base in our strengths of anime and games.”
Of course, it’s important to note that producers apparently have such faith in the second Mortal Kombat movie (hitting theaters on May 8, 2026) that they’re already writing the script for the third film.
However, Warner Bros. Games has been struggling these last few years. Rocksteady’s Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League resulted in Warner Bros. Games taking about a $200 million loss due to the game’s weak performance.
On the fighting game spectrum, Player First Games was acquired by Warner Bros. Games in the middle of last year. This was seemingly done in anticipation of the success of MultiVersus.
Unfortunately, MultiVersus ended up shutting its servers down for good before a year could transpire after this acquisition. No new content is being developed for the game.
To make matters worse, Player First Games had also been shut down as a studio. This suddenly left many employees of the company without a job.
Mortal Kombat 1, the latest entry in the Mortal Kombat series, has been able to sell 6.2 million units. For a fighting game, this is actually a massive success, but Warner Bros. could view this as an underperformance considering that Mortal Kombat 11 before it was able to push over 15 million units over the course of its lifetime.
This seems to be the case considering the release of Mortal Kombat 1: Definitive Edition. NetherRealm Studios has now shifted focus on their next project with this edition’s release even though Ed Boon himself had previously stated that the Khaos Reigns update was supposed to be “year two” for Mortal Kombat 1 content with plans for additional years of content implied to come after that.
Injustice 3 had supposedly been leaked by multiple voice actors, though statements about this were predictably retracted. Assuming Injustice 3 really is being developed by NetherRealm Studios, it would certainly present an interesting problem if Warner Bros. Discovery ends up selling NetherRealm Studios during the development of such a title.
Regardless, an acquisition by Sony would’ve led to Mortal Kombat games likely becoming exclusive to PlayStation hardware. On the other hand, we’d probably see more representation of some of the more mature PlayStation mascots within Mortal Kombat.
Back in 2011, Kratos appears as a guest character in Mortal Kombat 9. Of course, Kratos was exclusive to the PlayStation 3 version of Mortal Kombat 9, resulting in the character being banned from tournament play.
It’s perhaps fortunate that Sony is not actually interested in acquiring Warner Bros. assets as it would result Mortal Kombat becoming exclusive to the PlayStation while the Injustice series would probably be cancelled altogether.