Mortal Kombat (2021 film) is drawing 15x more Wikipedia traffic than normal

What this article is

Mortal Kombat is a 2021 American martial arts dark fantasy film based on the video-game series created by Ed Boon and John Tobias. The film serves as a reboot and is the third installment in the Mortal Kombat film series. Directed by Simon McQuoid from a screenplay by Greg Russo and David Callaham, it stars Lewis Tan, Jessica McNamee, Josh Lawson, Tadanobu Asano, Mehcad Brooks, Ludi Lin, Chin Han, Max Huang, Joe Taslim, and Hiroyuki Sanada. The film follows Cole Young, a washed-up mixed martial arts fighter who discovers he is among a group of fighters chosen to defend Earthrealm against malevolent forces from Outworld in the eponymous Mortal Kombat tournament.

Summary text from the Wikipedia article "Mortal Kombat (2021 film)", available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full article.

What changed that day

The article lost 120 characters on balance that day. See everything that changed on 2026-05-09 in Wikipedia's own diff view — that is where the reason for a surge is usually visible, written and sourced by the editors who were following the story.

How this was measured

Views are Wikimedia's own pageview counts for en.wikipedia, filtered to agent=user so automated traffic is excluded. The baseline is the median of the previous 60 days, which is used instead of the mean so that an earlier surge cannot flatten a later one. The multiple is the day's views divided by that median.