Celebrity Mortal Kombat Series
An AI parody series with 100M+ views, recasting celebrities as Mortal Kombat fighters.
- Date
- September 2025
- Reach
- 100M+ views
- Response
- Reaction from Ed Boon, Mortal Kombat co-creator
- Made with
- Flux, Midjourney, GPT Imagen-1, GPT, Elevenlabs, Kling, Veo3, Minimax, Photoshop, Premiere
2023 to present
Celebrity Mortal Kombat started with a casting question: if famous people were Mortal Kombat fighters, what would their costumes, powers, voices, and rivalries look like? I kept coming back to it because I could keep adding fighters and the joke still worked at a glance.
I created the series and do the character direction, image and video production, writing, voices, and final edit. In every version, each fighter has to be clear immediately and the whole roster has to look consistent. You should recognize the face right away, tell the fighters apart by their silhouettes, and see what their powers are. The arena, the short voice exchange, and the edit should feel like the game.
The tools have changed over time. I design the fighters' silhouettes and wardrobe in Flux, Midjourney, and GPT Imagen-1, and animate them with Kling, Veo3, and Minimax. The voiceover banter comes from ElevenLabs and GPT, and I finish each piece in Photoshop and Premiere.
The original series did far better than I expected. It passed 100 million combined views across YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, and other platforms, reached Reddit's front page, and got a reaction from Mortal Kombat co-creator Ed Boon.
Mortal Kombat co-creator Ed Boon reacting to the roster.
See the original Reddit thread.
The game
We turned the videos into a real game. I worked on it in 2025, and in June 2026 IShowSpeed played it live on stream. It was a very exciting full circle moment.
2025
The 2025 edition adds new matchups and a more consistent process for making the visuals. It's still deliberately tongue-in-cheek.
2024
For the 2024 roster I split production into separate passes for character design, motion, voice, and editing, so the fighters would all look like they were in the same arena.
Midjourney work
The contact sheets and prompts below are from the 2024 lineup. I used Midjourney to try many versions of the casting, costumes, elemental powers, and silhouettes before choosing the fighters for the final edit.
2023
The original 2023 series set the basic process: generate a fighter, keep iterating until the character is recognizable at a glance, add motion and voice lines, then finish it by hand.
