“What’s next?”
That’s the question that’s been lingering on the minds of fans the world over since the release of the latest Mortal Kombat film. Warner has yet to offer any official word on a sequel, but with the film topping the box office in its opening weekend (not to mention beating Zack Snyder’s Justice League for the title of HBO Max’s most-viewed weekend premiere), the odds seem pretty good.
So what could the future hold for the budding film franchise? Several people who worked on the film have publicly emphasized that the focus was on the first movie as opposed to building out potential sequels. And to be sure, that’s a good thing. But screenwriter Greg Russo was nonetheless conscious of the bigger picture. As Russo explained to Collider, that awareness extended at least to the narrative structure of what he hopes will be a trilogy:
“I always saw [movie one] as pre-tournament, then [movie two is] hopefully tournament, then [movie three] is [post-tournament]. So the idea was that this was going to be a pre-tournament movie that would hopefully sow the seeds for the tournament, the final.”
One of the interesting things about Mortal Kombat was its ability to respect the broader lore of the games while simultaneously taking liberties with the familiar narrative arc of the games. This is in direct contrast to the original 1995 Mortal Kombat film, which followed the plot of the first game fairly closely and incorporated elements of Mortal Kombat II into its third act (meanwhile the 1997 sequel, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, loosely adapted Mortal Kombat 3). It’s certainly easy for fans of the games to read a progression along the lines of those classic fighting games into the structure Russo outlined, with the events of the first film and the planned tournament of the second corresponding loosely to an amalgam of the first two games and the “post-tournament” of the third film perhaps referring to the Outworld invasion depicted in MK3. But having said that, the first film’s demonstrated a willingness to zig when fans would expect it to zag means that even the most seasoned Mortal Kombat die-hards can only guess where things might go from here.
Make sure to check back with Geek Anything for more on the cinematic future of Mortal Kombat as it becomes available!
