In 2021, Warner Bros. brought the Mortal Kombat video game franchise back to the big screen. It was a weird time for movies, with the pandemic still fresh on everyone’s minds, and yet the film was still a big enough success for a sequel to be put into the works. That sequel, Mortal Kombat II, is now in theaters, and it once again tees up a future sequel.
However, it doesn’t do that with some cheeky end-credits scene. No, Mortal Kombat II teases where Mortal Kombat III will go with hints throughout the film itself. We’ll explain below, with full quotes and some insight from the film’s writer. Major spoilers follow.
In Mortal Kombat II, the titular tournament finally happens with Earthrealm securing victory. But that only happens when Katana switches sides and kills Shao Kahn, who killed her father in the film’s first scene. The good guys win, but it comes at quite a loss, including the deaths of Liu Kang, Jax, and Cole Young. (Though, to be fair, Cole Young’s gruesome death sure did feel like more of a wink to fans who hated the first movie than it did a big, narrative moment. But I digress.)
The heroes of Earthrealm then steal Shao Kahn’s necromancer and vow to travel to Netherrealm to bring their friends back from the dead. Maybe even Cole Young!
Recently, io9 spoke to Jeremy Slater, the writer of Mortal Kombat II, and asked him about the pluses and minuses of the fact that death means nothing in this series. Case in point, Kano and Kung Lao come back, and now Liu Kang and Jax certainly look like they’ll be on their way back, too.
“It’s sort of baked into the DNA of Mortal Kombat as a franchise,” Slater told io9. “If you know how to do the fatalities, every one of these matches ends with one of your favorite characters getting his spine ripped out or his skull smashed or something like that. And then the next time you put in a quarter, they’re all alive again. And I’m as guilty of that as anybody because I was like, ‘I’m not going to write this movie unless you let me bring Kano back.’ Like, Josh Lawson was my favorite thing about the first movie, hands down. And I wanted to have a Kung Lao fight. I wanted to have Bi-Han in there. So selfishly, you want to be able to play with all of the best toys in the sandbox. But at the same time, for the characters, death is still real. It still matters. And so you have to approach it and treat it with severity. When characters die in this movie, it’s painful for the survivors, and we want it to be shocking for the audience. We want it to be a little bit of a gut punch.”
“The nice thing about Mortal Kombat as a franchise is we do always have that sort of get-out-of-jail-free card where there’s always ways to bring back dead characters in future installments, whether it’s making them revenants, whether it’s time travel, whatever you want,” Slater continued.
And here’s where he starts to subtly tease what might be coming in the future. “They’ve done it a lot of different ways in the game. So yeah, there were some deaths that were very painful for me to write in this movie, that are still painful for me to watch where I’m like, ‘I can’t believe I’m the guy who killed X.’ But some of these characters and actors, we have big plans for them in the future, and just because some of them met a bad ending in this movie, it doesn’t mean that’s the last time you’re going to see them in a Mortal Kombat.”
“Some of those deaths were out of necessity, and some of those deaths were because we do have bigger plans for some of those characters down the road, and that their deaths in or what happens to them in this movie is the first part of a larger puzzle,” Slater finished.
We don’t want to put words in his mouth, but you have to assume he’s mostly referring to Liu Kang. His death is the most shocking in the film, and he also explains how he needs to die in order to bring Kung Lao back. That very much seems like where the next film is going. Earthrealm takes the battle to Netherrealm.
And don’t worry. Slater is hard at work on Mortal Kombat III and taking what fans think of II into consideration. “For a very long time, I’ve been writing and developing Mortal Kombat III sort of in a vacuum. And now that fans are seeing [part two] and responding to it, we can see tonally what’s working. We can see, in terms of the characters, who are they responding to, [and] who are they going to want to see more of in a part three,” he said. “In the same way that we took the lessons from one to make two even better, I want to take the lessons from two and make three the best one yet. That is the ultimate goal. But, you know, all of these decisions are ultimately out of my hands. My job isn’t to make a good movie. It’s to give the filmmakers all the tools they need to make an incredible movie. So I am happy to be a part of this universe for as long as they will have me.”
Mortal Kombat II is now in theaters.
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