It is once again time to scream “Mortal Kombat!” while techno music blares on the soundtrack.
The recent Mortal Kombat movie will get the sequel that the film’s final scenes teased. And according to Deadline, Simon McQuoid, who helmed the previous movie, will return for this second chapter of the story.
The last Mortal Kombat did not actually depict the martial arts tournament of its title and countless video games. Instead, it essentially told a prequel story, with various fighters from Earth and the evil “Outworld” massing their forces to prepare for the next one of these occasional “Mortal Kombat” tournaments. Just before the closing credits, the film’s main character, Cole Young, headed to Hollywood to find a longtime Mortal Kombat character who hadn’t appeared in the first film, Johnny Cage.
The last Mortal Kombat premiered in theaters and on HBO Max in the spring of 2021. In an interview with ScreenCrush for the first film, McQuoid had this to say about why so many video game adaptations stumble:
I don’t really know. I certainly don’t profess to have the secret sauce on that particular thing. We felt from the start of this process that we were really trying to respect the material and not ignore it. And we really spent a lot of time analyzing and thinking about what mattered to the fans, and what this property really is. Perhaps sometimes what I’ve observed in other video game adaptations, certainly some of the less successful ones, they don’t tend to do that. They think they can run away from the material and do whatever they like with it. And it just doesn’t get respected and elevated enough.
We’ll see whether he elevates Mortal Kombat 2 a little down the road. Let’s hope it’s at least better than this Mortal Kombat movie sequel…
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