‘Mortal Kombat II’ Writer Jeremy Slater Explains All Those Fatalities, Resurrecting [SPOILER] for the Third Movie and the ‘Dozens’ of Characters He Wants for Sequels

SPOILER ALERT: This article contains major spoilers for “Mortal Kombat II,” now playing in theaters.

Writer Jeremy Slater grew up playing “Mortal Kombat” in his local arcade and spent hours mastering the violent fighting game on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and Sega Genesis. He was a fan of the original 1995 movie, directed by Paul W. S. Anderson, and now, more than 30 years later, he’s penned the script for the big-budget adaptation “Mortal Kombat II.”

The sequel, which opened to $40 million at the box office this weekend, continues the story from the 2021 movie, which was released amid the pandemic simultaneously in theaters and on HBO Max. The first movie had its fans, with many praising the gory fight scenes and accuracy to the video games, but it left out one key component: the actual Mortal Kombat tournament. With the sequel, Slater doesn’t waste time kicking things off with the battle-to-the-death showdowns and nostalgic characters that made the games so popular.

Teased in the first movie, fan-favorite fighter Johnny Cage is introduced in “Mortal Kombat II,” played by Karl Urban. The sequel also brings in the deadly Kitana (Adeline Rudolph), razor-sharp Baraka (CJ Bloomfield), final boss Shao Kahn (Martyn Ford) and more. It doesn’t hold back on the action or violent “fatality” kill scenes either, but, like the games, death isn’t always the end for these video game characters. Multiple fighters who died in the first movie are resurrected from the afterlife to battle again in the sequel. And Slater, who’s already tapped to write a third “Mortal Kombat” movie, teases one key character who’s coming back from the dead in the next film.

Before “Mortal Kombat II,” Slater created Marvel’s “Moon Knight” series, executive produced Netflix’s “Umbrella Academy” and co-wrote Warner Bros.’ last Monsterverse entry, “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire.” He also co-wrote this summer’s “Coyote vs. Acme,” which was originally shelved despite being completed by Warner Bros. Discovery but then was saved by Ketchup Entertainment. It was announced last year at New York Comic Con that he’ll be writing “Mortal Kombat III,” continuing his sprawling video game story. With Variety, he teases what fans can expect in the threequel, which fighter is getting resurrected and who he wants to see in a spinoff.

The first movie set up the “Mortal Kombat” tournament and the inclusion of Johnny Cage at the very end. Where did you start with planning things for the sequel?

Those were the two big promises in the first movie; beyond that, it was very much a blank slate. What I pitched is: It’s not that we don’t need to continue the story of Cole Young, but for me the joy of “Mortal Kombat” is you put a quarter in the machine and you select a different character and you have an entirely different story. So my argument was we don’t need to be tied down to just one POV; let’s introduce some new characters.

Johnny and Kitana became the two emotional pillars of the movie. Kitana has a really tragic, rich backstory with this warlord barbarian who killed her family, enslaved her people and stole her throne. It gives her some really personal stakes in the matter. With Johnny, we knew that we needed a big movie star to come in and join the cast. A lot of times in the past, Johnny is used as just comic relief, which is fine but it doesn’t give an actor like Karl Urban very much to do. So part of my pitch was rather than trying to say he’s a martial arts star who’s also the biggest movie star on the planet in 2026, let’s lean into those action-movie realities of what the landscape actually looks like.

Johnny Cage in the original games was very famously modeled off Jean-Claude Van Damme. Obviously guys like Van Damme are not the biggest action stars in the world right now. That was a really attractive starting place for someone who had this shot at fame and because of his own mistakes he saw that success slip through his fingers and it left him feeling broken, jaded and like he doesn’t have a place in the world anymore. Once I cracked that, that’s a character I can take on a full journey over the course of this movie and really get the audience on his side and have you rooting for this guy. If you start him in a low place, he has plenty of room to grow and succeed.

Characters are dying and getting resurrected left and right in the movie. How did you keep track of who was on the board?

I had to draw up a full bracket before I started the script. The sad thing about the movie is you’re going to have to kill some of your darlings. But it is a tournament to the death, so you have to make those tough calls. I had to figure out who I wanted standing in that final battle and then the tier below them. If these are the top two, who are the four fighting below that? Who are the eight below that? You have to plan out that tier of who you can you afford to lose. Who do you have to keep alive for narrative reasons? If we have to keep this person alive, who can we pair them against so that it doesn’t seem convoluted that they managed to survive? There was a lot of mental gymnastics that goes into the basic structure. We locked the tournament wins and losses down before we wrote a page of the screenplay. We can’t suddenly decide halfway through this guy lives instead, without upsetting the whole cart. Locking that down was that probably the single biggest challenge.

You kill off Cole Young, who was the protagonist in the first film, early in the sequel. How did you come to the decision to murder the previous main character?

It’s something I pitched in the round table when they brought in a bunch of writers because at the time I wasn’t writing it. It was someone else’s problem. It’s very easy when you’re just sitting there throwing out ideas to be like, “I would kill that guy.” It is tough, because I really like Lewis Tan as an actor. He’s a phenomenal human being and a world class martial artist. The reality is that his inclusion was something that was sort of studio-mandated on the first movie. They wanted that POV character.

But for the fans, they look at Cole Young and they’re like, “This guy doesn’t belong.” It’s like an Avengers movie where you’ve got Iron Man and Captain America, and then you have Bob over here and people are like, “He’s not an Avenger.” The fans have been waiting 30 years to spend time with these characters, and when it’s not one of those characters eating up the screen time, they get resentful. The one thing I will say is death is never permanent in the “Mortal Kombat” universe. So just because I don’t think you’re ever going to see Cole Young again, but that doesn’t mean you’re not going to see Lewis Tan again in some regards. Even for the deaths that were really hard to pull the trigger on, we do have long-term plans for some of those characters. Some of those deaths are necessities, because they are potentially setting up future story threads.

The other major hero death is Liu Kang, but in the video games he eventually comes back to life as a fire god. Is that something you’re going to explore in “Mortal Kombat III”?

Absolutely. My pitch in the round table was you need two shocking deaths. Killing Cole is absolutely going to shock the casual fans who bought a ticket to the first movie and are expecting to see him be the hero again. It’s not going to shock the hardcore fans who have been online calling for this character’s death. On the same token, the casual fans are not going to be surprised by a death like Liu Kang, but that’s going to be absolutely shattering to the hardcore fans because canonically Liu Kang is the one who defeats Shao Kahn. A lot of them are walking into the movie expecting him to be the champion. By setting up Kitana’s backstory in the way we did, we sort of wrote ourselves into a corner where there was no satisfying person to kill Shao Kahn except for Kitana. She is the one who has been wronged by him and spent her life waiting for revenge.

Then the question is: Do you have Liu Kang standing on the sidelines, which didn’t seem that fun, or do we try to do something shocking and surprising? So we always had planned to kill him in this movie, but Ludi Lin is so goddamned good. We didn’t expect how much even the casual audience would fall in love with Liu Kang. We always knew that we would be bringing Liu Kang back in some regard in the third movie. But we did wind up altering his death a little bit to make it more of a choice. So we’re not sure if he actually died or did he ascend to some other plane? What actually happened to hit to him in that moment is absolutely a mystery that’s going to be explored in “Mortal Kombat III.”

Was there any other character from first movie who died that you debated bringing back to life in the sequel?

I told them right off the bat, I’m not taking this job unless I can bring Kano back to life. Josh Lawson was my favorite part about the first movie. I thought his version of Kano is so funny and so instantly iconic. So I knew I had to have him in the movie, and I really wanted a Kung Lao fight. Those were two that I had to bring back, and then you look at the amount of real estate you have. We could bring back Kabal, Reptile, Mileena or Goro, but that means we’re not going to have the chance to introduce someone like Quan Chi or Jade. There’s only so much real estate and new characters that the audience can can keep track of. Between Kitana, Sindel, Shao Kahn, Jade, Johnny Cage and Baraka, we already had a lot of new faces joining. The great thing about the “Mortal Kombat” universe is death is never permanent, and that doesn’t mean we’ll never see them again in some future installment.

What stage is your “Mortal Kombat III” script at?

We’re not done. I wrote an exploratory draft with me throwing a lot of different things at the wall, just to see what was resonating and what wasn’t. We have a really great creative brain trust between Dave Neustadter at New Line and our producer Todd Garner. The three of us looked at those early pages and said, “Here’s the stuff that’s working. Here’s the stuff where we may be biting off more than we can chew.” Now we are seeing fans watching 2 and reacting. In the same way that 2 was tailored to take advantage of the strengths of 1, hopefully 3 can now be tailored to take advantages of the strengths of 2, and we can continue to take those elements that are working and push them even further. So I’m close to finishing a second draft that I feel very good about, but then ultimately it’s going to be in New Line and Warner Bros.’ hands.

The video games have explored different worlds, alternate futures and universe reboots. Is that a direction the movies would go in?

It’s a great question that I don’t have a solid answer for yet. I think we would certainly want to stay steer clear of doing any sort of major timeline reboots or resets, especially because what we’re learning right now is people like these characters and tone. Doing a board wipe and starting from scratch with new versions may be a bridge too far. Some of that stuff feels like fertile ground to explore, but maybe not right off the bat. Two was very much about reclaiming the mistakes of 1 and doubling down on the strengths and proving this could be a franchise. Nothing would make me happier than this becoming like New Line’s version of “Fast and Furious,” where every couple of years you get an amazing “Mortal Kombat” movie but then there’s also room for spinoffs in between where we can take some of these side characters and give them more room to flourish or play with different genres. In success, I think it’s a lot easier to grow “Mortal Kombat” into its own mini universe, and when that happens that’s when you have the ability to start getting more creative with different multiversal and time travel stuff.

What characters would you like to see get a spinoff?

Johnny Cage and Kano, Karl Urban and Josh Lawson, have such amazing chemistry together. The idea of pairing those guys up seems incredibly fun. Obviously, Kung Lao and Liu Kang are huge fan favorites, so are Kitana and Jade. There’s such a deep roster for the villains bench. This is just me as a fan geeking out. I love Scorpion and Sub-Zero. A story about Scorpion’s entire life would be amazing. I’m dying to get more Baraka into the universe, since he’s my favorite character. It’s not really an answer, because I’m saying everybody. You could do Jax and Sonya’s “Special Forces.” You could do “Deadly Alliance.” You could do “Shaolin Monks.” There’s such a deep, deep roster to draw from, because the games have had their own spinoffs and any one of those could be translated to live-action. If it’s done with enough care and love, we could make it really, really awesome. There certainly have been no official plans or anything worked out, but in success the sky is the limit.

Which characters from the games would you like to see get introduced to live-action?

I know exactly which new characters we’re bringing in, but it’s way too early to tell people at this point. We’re also being really receptive to the fan base. Todd Garner has maintained such a great relationship with the “Mortal Kombat” fan base and keeping a dialogue open in terms of “Who are you dying to see in live action?” We have that feedback to take into consideration, but we also have to balance that against the story needs of where we ultimately want to take it and what we’re building toward. I have dozens of characters that I want to bring into live action. Some of them are on deck next, and some of them are being saved for a hypothetical 4, 5 or 6. In success, we will get to as many of the classics as we possibly can, but we always want to be careful to never overload the audience.