Celebrity Mortal Kombat Series
An AI parody series with 100M+ views, recasting celebrities as Mortal Kombat fighters.
Response
- 100M+ views
- Ed Boon reacted
Details
Tools: Flux, Midjourney, GPT Imagen-1, GPT, Elevenlabs, Kling, Veo3, Minimax, Photoshop, Premiere
2023 - Present
Celebrity Mortal Kombat began with a simple casting game: if famous people were Mortal Kombat fighters, what would their costumes, powers, voices, and rivalries look like? I kept returning to it because the roster could grow indefinitely while the joke remained immediate.
The original series went far beyond what I expected: more than 100 million cumulative views across YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, and other platforms. It reached Reddit's front page and got a reaction from Mortal Kombat co-creator Ed Boon.
The familiar faces and game nostalgia get people through the door. The work is making every new fighter feel as if they belong in the same ridiculous alternate franchise.
The workflow has grown with each edition. I shape the fighter silhouettes and wardrobe in Flux, Midjourney, and GPT Imagen-1; animate them with Kling, Veo3, and Minimax; build the voiceover banter with ElevenLabs and GPT; then finish the pieces in Photoshop and Premiere.
Mortal Kombat co-creator Ed Boon reacting to the roster.
See the original Reddit thread.
2025 Edition
The 2025 edition adds new matchups and a more consistent visual pipeline, but keeps the tone deliberately tongue-in-cheek.
2024 Edition
The 2024 roster was where the production became more modular: separate passes for character design, motion, voice, and editing, all aimed at keeping the fighters in the same arena.
Midjourney Process
The contact sheets and prompt views below show the volume of visual exploration behind the 2024 lineup. I used Midjourney to iterate on casting, costumes, elemental powers, and silhouettes before choosing the fighters that made it into the final edit.
2023 Edition Videos
The original 2023 series established the basic recipe: generate a fighter, keep iterating until the character reads immediately, add motion and voice lines, then finish the illusion by hand.