Did you watch the new Mortal Kombat movie this weekend? While it wasn’t a flawless victory, fans of the hyper-violent video game shouldn’t have much to complain about — it’s incredibly authentic to its source material, right down to the gory fatalities. It sounds like the sequel, if one gets made, will be as well.
Speaking with Syfy Wire, screenwriter Greg Russo explained how focusing the first movie left many parts of the Mortal Kombat mythos available for the future.
“In the back of my head, I was always thinking like, ‘Where can I go? Where can the world go so that it’s not painted into a corner?’ And so one of the realms that I felt like it didn’t make sense to introduce in this story, because we were so focused on Earthrealm and Outworld, was Edenia, which is another big realm in the Mortal Kombat universe. And that has a ton of great characters that reside there, their storylines intersect there,” Russo said. “My favourite character, Kitana, is a princess in Edenia and it just didn’t feel right to bring her in. There’s other characters too that people love there, like Sindel and Jade and all those characters. So that’s a whole realm that I think is worth exploring, and I have some really cool ideas of what I would do with storylines there.”
Of course, if you’ve seen the movie, you know that main Mortal Kombat character Johnny Cage will almost certainly join the sequel, given that the movie ends with Cole Young (Lewis Tan) heading to Hollywood to recruit the movie star. There’s also a pretty solid chance that Sub-Zero (Joe Taslim) will reappear, despite Scorpion (Hiroyuki Sanada) incinerating him with hellfire in the film’s final fight. This is partially because no one really stays dead in Mortal Kombat; in the game mythos, Sub-Zero does die and gets resurrected as Noob Saibot, probably because Sub-Zero is one of the franchise’s most popular characters.
The whole interview is worth a read! And if you’ve read this but somehow haven’t seen Mortal Kombat yet, it’s available now in theatres.