Mortal Kombat 2 writer Jeremy Slater has dropped new details on the upcoming sequel. In an interview with The Direct‘s Russ Milheim, Slater stated that the script is roughly halfway complete. He also teases that the film will be “incredibly satisfying, and really exciting, and unpredictable.”
“This is Mortal Kombat. We have guys who are ripping off their faces and breathing fire—it’s a weird universe. Let’s embrace some of that weirdness, and let’s make a Mortal Kombat sequel that no one is expecting and that can kind of sneak in and blow everyone away. We’re still really early in that process, but I’m having a blast with this script,” said Slater.
Mortal Kombat received mixed reviews, earning a 54% on Rotten Tomatoes and 6.1/10 on IMDb. Critics complained that the movie’s story made no sense for anyone who wasn’t already familiar with the series. Meanwhile, fans disliked that the movie’s new protagonist, Cole, got so much screentime at the expense of established Mortal Kombat characters and that the film played around in unwelcome ways with the universe’s lore. In other words, Mortal Kombat tried to play to both new and old audiences and largely missed out on both.
But there’s good news for Mortal Kombat fans — according to Slater, the filmmakers are aware of these criticisms and seem to be taking them to heart. “I think they definitely learned some lessons the last time around in terms of, ‘Here’s the stuff fans responded to, and here’s what people liked out of the movie, and here’s the stuff that didn’t work out as well as we hoped,'” Slater explained. “So we’re really looking at this as a chance to take everything that worked in the first one and do it even better and give the audience even more.”
