Mortal Kombat II: Jeremy Slater Unpacks New Ending, Character Deaths
Jeremy Slater and Karl Urban as Johnny Cage in New Line Cinema’s Mortal Kombat II
Courtesy of Melissa Russell; Warner Bros. Pictures
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[This story contains spoilers for Mortal Kombat II.]
Mortal Kombat II is a victory for screenwriter Jeremy Slater in a way that goes beyond the franchise-best opening weekend of $40 million.
For the last two decades, the Kansas native has mostly been working in the trenches of IP-based storytelling, and he’s experienced every imaginable high and low that has come with the town’s decision to double-down on prebranded movies and TV series. Ironically, it was his acclaimed original spec script, Man of Tomorrow, that opened the door to the world of established properties.
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The 2012 Black List selection — a 1940s-set superhero noir about an FBI agent who’s caught in the middle of a Chicagoland duel between Superman and Batman-like figures — opened the door to Slater’s six-month stretch on Fantastic Four (2015). While the maligned final cut does not resemble his script, he remains proud of the version he submitted to Fox. From there, he’d go on to work on recognizable titles including Death Note, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, Coyote vs. Acme, as well as series adaptations of The Exorcist, The Umbrella Academy and Moon Knight.
Most of these experiences featured a parade of writers, voices and cooks to where the writing credits are as lengthy as a signed petition. But that all changed on the Simon McQuoid-directed Mortal Kombat II. From Slater’s stand-out pitch at the writers’ roundtable, pre-green light, to the new ending he wrote during post-production, he was the sole screenwriter for the entire enterprise, a rarity on franchise projects in this day and age, unless a writer-director is in the driver’s seat.
Slater chalks it up to his time in television, along with the increased wisdom and decreased ego that come with age, for this fortunate turn of events.
“In the beginning of my career, I’d fight notes and reactions from my collaborators. But over the last ten years, my experiences in TV have helped me learn that collaboration is the name of the game, and it really has fundamentally changed my writing,” Slater tells The Hollywood Reporter. “I was able to get on the same wavelength very early with [the Mortal Kombat II brain trust]. We were all trying to make the exact same movie, and when that happens, it’s much easier for the writer to stay creatively involved. So fixing that mindset [that it’s less about me and more about the collaboration] is something I was not capable of doing in my Fantastic Four days nearly 15 years ago.”
As for the new ending Slater wrote during Mortal Kombat II’s post-production, Earthrealm’s surviving champions reunite and agree to head off to the Netherrealm so that they can rescue and revive their friends who died during the tournament against their Outworld foes. This coda was filmed during the movie’s week of planned reshoots.
“When we were looking at the initial cuts, we were missing the final check-in with all of our characters. It happened as a wordless montage, and that wasn’t sending people out of the theater with the feeling that we particularly wanted. So that’s why I wrote the new ending,” Slater recalls. “It teases where the series could go in a future movie. We know we killed some pretty big names along the way, but death is never final in this universe. So we wanted people to walk out of the theater with that glimmer of hope that they’ll maybe see some of their all-time faves again.”
Among the deaths was Lewis Tan’s Cole Young, the original protagonist of the 2021 movie. Cole faced heavy criticism at the time — not because of Tan’s performance, but for the reboot’s choice to invent a new lead rather than using one of the many beloved characters from the Mortal Kombat video games. So Slater, with respect to gameplay, de-emphasized Cole in favor of two new protagonists, Kitana (Adeline Rudolph) and Johnny Cage (Karl Urban).
“One of my approaches to this was saying, ‘Look, the joy of playing Mortal Kombat is every time you put a quarter in the machine, you select a different character for a wildly different experience,’” Slater shares. “I w