Mortal Kombat director Simon McQuoid promised that his movie would match the games’ fatalities and he certainly delivered. Over two hours we saw heads popped, arms smashed off, hearts ripped from chests, ninjas getting incinerated, monsters having holes blasted through them, souls being sucked, and a very satisfying death by garden gnome.
So, where do you go from here? Well, given that Mortal Kombat is looking to perform better than the already extremely successful Godzilla vs. Kong in HBO Max viewing figures, a sequel is all but guaranteed. Towards the end, there were a number of hints as to what this will consist of and it seems that a proper tournament to decide the fate of Earthrealm is now imminent, with our characters frantically searching for the next lineup of fighters.
Who these will be remains a mystery, though we can be fairly sure that fan favorite Johnny Cage will be making his debut, as a shot in the film lingered on a poster for one of his movies. Beyond that, it seems that big bad Shao Khan will be turning up with a whole new squad of Outworld monsters to bring the pain as well, and according to our sources – the same ones who told us Ben Affleck was returning as Batman in The Flash – they’ll be going a lot further than what we’ve already seen in terms of blood and gore.
Buoyed up by the response to the killer fatalities, the creative team behind the pic are apparently looking to go full throttle and crank things up to even more extreme levels for the sequel, with Mortal Kombat 2 set to be much bloodier. What we’ll see exactly remains unclear, but I would like to point out that for all the awesome nods to the games, we still haven’t had anyone’s spine getting torn from their body…
In any case, after thirty years, the Mortal Kombat franchise has explored hundreds of ways to disassemble, explode and smash apart a human, so at least they have a lot of material to work with.