Will Mortal Kombat 3 Really Have No Tournament? We Have an Official Answer [Exclusive]

Mortal Kombat II has been a big hit, with a 90% fresh audience score on Rotten Tomatoes and an estimated $41 million opening weekend box office take. One of the biggest selling points for this film was bringing back the tournament from the video games that the title is named after. One of the biggest problems with several of the Mortal Kombat movies is that they didn’t include the tournament itself in the films. However, while the return of the tournament gave fans what they had been missing from the past movies in the franchise, that doesn’t mean the next movie in the series will maintain that aspect of the story.

In an exclusive interview with ComicBook, Mortal Kombat II writer Jeremy Slater admitted that there might not be a tournament in Mortal Kombat 3. “I think there’s ways to get the tournament feel without having a specific tournament,” Slater said. “It’s a larger ongoing question that I don’t have a yes or no answer for at the moment, but I think whether there’s a tournament or not, there’s ways to still get the feel of two people fighting to the death in terms of having those stakes that the tournament gives you.”

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Slater did say that he would want the next Mortal Kombat sequel to have the feel of the tournaments, but he doesn’t want the next sequel to feel derivative. He said, if anything, it can’t be the same tournament with brackets and the same stakes. He said that it needs to be different to surprise fans, and the only way to do that is not to repeat the tournament format from Mortal Kombat II.

“I think you wanna look at why does the tournament work for the audiences in part two,” Slater said. “Because it’s suspenseful, they understand what the stakes are, they understand what the pressures are. They know that every 10 minutes, they’re going to get a great one-on-one battle between two of these characters fighting to the death.”

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From the sound of it, Slater wants Mortal Kombat 3 to have the same setup, where there are battles coming, and fans can expect a new fight between two big characters. However, he wants to find a way to do this without the forced setup of the tournament. Of course, this has to be done carefully because the biggest complaints about the first movie in this current series are that there was no tournament. That made it nothing like Mortal Kombat in anything but name. Without the tournament, what is the purpose of the franchise?

The Mortal Kombat franchise has never been highly praised by critics. The first movie from 1995 has a 44% critics’ score and a 58% audience score. The sequel was a rock-bottom 4% critics’ score and a terrible 24% audience score. The reboot in 2021 had a 55% critics’ score and 85% audience score. Mortal Kombat II blows both of those numbers away. The 1995 movie is the only one to break $100 million at the box office, and Mortal Kombat II might come close and should break the last movie’s $84 million in 2021. It remains to be seen if Mortal Kombat 3 can carry on the momentum.

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