3 Things Mortal Kombat 3 Needs to Keep the Franchise Going, Including a Major Twist

Mortal Kombat II is now streaming on HBO Max, and a lot of fans who didn’t contribute to its modest $129 million box office are finally catching up on what the sequel was all about. Mortal Kombat II continues the story of the first film, while also pivoting focus to a new primary character. Karl Urban (The Boys) takes on the role of Johnny Cage, the martial artist-turned-movie star, who is called on by Lord Raiden (Tadanobu Asano) to join Earthrealm’s team in the tenth and final Mortal Kombat tournament against Outworld.

By the end of the film (SPOILERS?) Earthrealm once again prevails, but not without the great cost of some of its champions. There is a clear setup for Mortal Kombat III as well, with plenty of room still left for the franchise to grow. Here are 3 things that the Mortal Kombat movie franchise needs to do, in order to make sure the third film draws the biggest audience yet.

3. A Whole New Storyline

The first two Mortal Kombat movies have been focused on the tournament between Earthrealm and Outworld, just like the first two video games. However, by the time Mortal Kombat 3 was released, the franchise needed to pivot to a new story, and did so to great success. The third Mortal Kombat film needs to follow suit. There are two clear choices for how the franchise can proceed:

Mortal Kombat II ended with Earthrealm’s surviving champions capturing the necromancer, Quan Chi (Damon Herriman), and planned to use him to resurrect their dead comrades, with Liu Kang (Ludi Lin) already letting himself transition to the spiritual realm to rescue the spirits of the fallen, like Cole Young (Lewis Tan), Jax (Mehcad Brook), and Kung Lao (Max Huang). That’s already a two-part story to build a film on, which would feature Earthrealm, Outworld (trying to rescue Quan Chi), and the introduction of Netherrealm, Mortal Kombat‘s version of the Underworld.

The other option would be for the third film to adapt the storyline of the third video game, in which Outworld exploited a loophole in the barrier between realms to begin merging the two worlds. The souls of everyone in Earthrealm were held hostage while Earth’s champions battled to defeat Outworld and free them. Turning Earth into a supernatural dystopian battlefield would be a new Mortal Kombat movie experience, for sure.

2. More Iconic Characters

The Mortal Kombat film franchise quite literally has a lot of game left on the table, and Mortal Kombat III needs to take advantage. There are at least half a dozen characters that are considered fan-favorites, if not iconic, and they are nowhere to be found in these reboot films.

Nightwolf deserves better than Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (1997); cyborg ninjas Cyrax and Sektor are long overdue; there’s a second, more heroic, Sub-Zero (Kuai Liang) to introduce, with anti-hero characters like blind warrior Kenshi Takanashi in the mix, and even one major big bad yet to play (Shinnok, God of Death and ruler of Netherrealm). The third film shouldn’t waste any opportunity to get some (if not all) of them on the screen.

1. Better Martial Arts Action

This is the one area where these new Mortal Kombat movies really need to shine, the third time around. The 1995 film used a mix of real martial artists and actors with martial arts training to create some now-iconic fight sequences; the reboot films haven’t made quite the same impression.

Today, Hollywood has any number of stunt team experts to choose from, whether that’s the American teams led by the likes of John Wick creators Chad Stahelski and David Leitch, or the martial arts masters of Hong Kong, Japan, or modern breakouts like the Indonesian martial artists behind The Raid. Any of them would be well-suited to making Mortal Kombat III offer fans the kind of fights that made the game feel so epic.

For now, Mortal Kombat III has not been greenlit, but the streaming performance of Mortal Kombat II could get it done. You can stream Mortal Kombat reboot films on HBO Max. Talk more fandom topics with us on the ComicBook Forum!