New Line Cinema and Warner Bros. finally brought the “Mortal Kombat” franchise back to the big screen with a hard-reboot produced by James Wan and director Simon McQuoid. While the action pic with a hybrid prelease in April didn’t set the box office on fire (stalling at $83.6 million at the global box office) and iffy critical response, there still seem to be plans for sequels.
Buried in a recent article from Variety breaking down why “Dune” was sticking to a release on HBO Max next month, the report mentions how Warner Bros. is “looking to developing other installments” in the “Mortal Kombat” universe.
It remains to be seen if that means more adventures following Lewis Tan’s new franchise hero, Cole Young, or looking towards others folks seen in the film such as Kano or Liu Kang.
One popular “Mortal Kombat” character that screams film adaptation is Johnny Cage. A character that was glaringly missing from the latest movie and sort of upset a good portion of fans. He ended up getting teased at the very end of the 2021 release with a poster for the faux movie “Citizen Cage” and fans have already attempted to start a campaign to get quippy actor Ryan Reynolds in the role, who seems a little too high-profile.
Cage has recently turned into a Deadpool-like meta character in the video games and was originally based on Jean-Claude Van Damme, a movie star that joins the tournament to prove himself as a true martial artist. The character was so popular in the first movie from director Paul W.S. Anderson (who would later unleash the “Resident Evil” film franchise upon us) that New Line got the brilliant idea in the regrettable sequel “Mortal Kombat: Annihilation” to kill him in the opening sequence.
“Mortal Kombat” is available now on HBO Max.