Fan-Favorite Character Is Confirmed to Return in Mortal Kombat III

Last week, the premiere of the movie Mortal Kombat II, directed by Simon McQuoid, took place. The film received quite good reviews from fans and even managed to make a mark at the box office. But most importantly, the movie turned out better than the first part, and fans of the franchise are especially happy about this.

As we know, Mortal Kombat III is happening, with the script being finished earlier this year by its screenwriter, Jeremy Slater. The details about the third installment are currently unknown, but Mortal Kombat II definitely lays the foundation for the film, and attentive viewers during the movie screening certainly noticed hints of its plot.

Recently, the abovementioned Jeremy Slater spoke to Variety, where he was asked about multiple, some expected and unexpected, deaths in Mortal Kombat II, and one of them caught up with Liu Kang, which surprised many fans quite a lot. Nevertheless, Slater confirmed that it was an initial plan to kill off Liu Kang in Mortal Kombat II, confirming he’s coming back in the third movie and hinting he might have some gods' power, just like in Mortal Kombat video games. In the same speech, he also reflected about the death of Cole Young—the protagonist of Mortal Kombat (2021), as you can check out below:

“My pitch in the round table was you need two shocking deaths. Killing Cole is absolutely going to shock the casual fans who bought a ticket to the first movie and are expecting to see him be the hero again. It’s not going to shock the hardcore fans who have been online calling for this character’s death. On the same token, the casual fans are not going to be surprised by a death like Liu Kang, but that’s going to be absolutely shattering to the hardcore fans because canonically Liu Kang is the one who defeats Shao Kahn. A lot of them are walking into the movie expecting him to be the champion. By setting up Kitana’s backstory in the way we did, we sort of wrote ourselves into a corner where there was no satisfying person to kill Shao Kahn except for Kitana. She is the one who has been wronged by him and spent her life waiting for revenge.

So we always had planned to kill him in this movie, but Ludi Lin is so goddamned good. We didn’t expect how much even the casual audience would fall in love with Liu Kang. We always knew that we would be bringing Liu Kang back in some regard in the third movie. But we did wind up altering his death a little bit to make it more of a choice. So we’re not sure if he actually died or did he ascend to some other plane? What actually happened to hit to him in that moment is absolutely a mystery that’s going to be explored in “Mortal Kombat III.”

Jeremy Slater not only confirmed Liu Kang's return in Mortal Kombat III but also revealed the first character of the movie. But considering the ending of Mortal Kombat II, we might have expected more characters to return—including Johnny Cage (Karl Urban), Kitana (Adeline Rudolph), Jade (Tati Gabrielle), Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee), Kano (Josh Lawson), Lord Raiden (Tadanobu Asano), Quan Chi (Damon Herriman), and more.

In other interviews, Jeremy Slater also confirmed that he wrote two post-credit scenes, which seemingly teased the third movie, but they were scrapped due to budget limits. Also, he revealed that Tremor was about to fight Sonya Blade instead of Sindel, but in the end, they came to the opinion that the character looked out of place.

There were rumors that the third film might adapt the events of the video game Mortal Kombat 3, and Ed Boon even stated that we could potentially see more than 10 films based on the iconic fighting franchise.

As for Mortal Kombat II, the film earned $40 million in the first weekend across the United States and Canada, and now the box office worldwide is more than $65 million.

Are you excited to see Ludi Lin back as Liu Kang in Mortal Kombat III? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

Mortal Kombat II is available now in cinemas.