Mortal Kombat Writer Greg Russo Reveals Storyline for Trilogy Plans

There are apparently plans for a Mortal Kombat trilogy according to writer Greg Russo, and he shared how the team approached their first entry with Collider. It wouldn't be too smart to focus on the future before handling this big film. Mortal Kombat fans have been waiting a long time for this movie, so it makes sense that they wanted to get the beginning right. The tournament structure foundation is set and the increasing action will be fun to watch if they get the chance to continue their story. Russo and the creative team have little to fear though. Fans have been loving the movie all over social media and the positive impressions have been pouring in. Mortal Kombat marks yet another early dub for HBO Max and their burgeoning streaming platform. It feels like just a few weeks ago Godzilla vs Kong was taking social media by storm, and now MK has the people talking again.

"Everybody was focused on movie one, right? You don't get a trilogy without it," Russo explains. "But as a writer, you should never be painting yourself in a corner, that's my motto. You should always be thinking about 'Where can your story go even beyond the two hours — this is not a lot of time — that I have to tell this story? Where else can it go?' So I always saw it as leading up to something bigger."

He continued, "And so the idea then became, alright, we have a certain amount of characters we can fit, don't have the luxury of having individual movies of all these characters, I'm getting thrown right into Avengers mode, which is fun and a challenge. But I knew that there were other characters I just couldn't get in, and it actually didn't even make sense to bring in yet for the story. So then it became a matter of, 'Well, who's the big characters that we wanna save?' 'Cause you also don't wanna use everything."

In some other comments, Russo brought home how this three act structure would look for fans. "Movie one, we were always kind of setting this up as — well I was setting it up, it's basically in my head — I always saw [movie one] as pre-tournament, then [movie two is] hopefully tournament, then [movie three is] post-tournament. So the idea was that this was going to be a pre-tournament movie that would hopefully sow the seeds for the tournament, the final."

Do you want all three Mortal Kombat films? Let us know down in the comments!