some hammer dude and winged chick from games no one played
I don't know about the hammer guy but Deadly Alliance was very popular back in the day, it's certainly not a game "no one played" it's the game that basically saved the franchise from irrelevance.
They didn't even go with the thotty design, that gave Nitara her limited fanbase.
I wish she had that outfit too, but it's still cool to have the character at all.
It really does feel like a kids movie. Though when I saw it there already were quite a few kids in the theater...
As others have pointed out, Mortal Kombat has always been essentially a kid's franchise.
And that's ok, violence in a fantasy context like Mortal Kombat, where it's always been over the top and like I said, happening in a fantasy context is inherently harmless for kids.
There's a world of difference between what could be called "fantasy violence" and violence in media that is actually meant to be portrayed realistically, go watch the movie Killing Them Softly and specifically the scene where Ray Liotta is beaten for an example of movie violence that is done totally realistically and it's absolutely horrifying, there's a world of difference between that and something like Mortal Kombat or older movies like Robocop, Total Recall, Predator or Terminator 2 for other examples of violent movies that were popular with kids.
Sometimes it really just depends entirely on context.
Another thing to remember is that kids are simply incredibly curious about the world we live in and violence is simply a part of the world we live in like it or not, so it's natural and even to some degree healthy for kids to explore their curiosity about violence in a proper context.
It's related to why kids also like scary stuff, again, it's exploring an emotion, in this case fear, and curiosity about that emotion and it's healthy for kids to learn how to cope with and understand fear in a fantasy context, it's healthy for kids to explore a wide array of emotions through media or storytelling, same deal with something like Bambi's mom getting shot, in that case helping kids understand emotions like grief and concepts like loss.
We insult kids' intelligence by thinking all of their media should be wholly sanitized stuff with no more emotional content than simple pleasantness, because life simply isn't always pleasant and it's good for people to learn how to deal with that early.
