Jeremy Slater Unpacks New Ending, Character Deaths

[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.

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 wasn’t interested in continuing the storyline of Cole Young from the first movie. It’s not necessarily admitting that mistakes were made. But we did say, ‘Let’s look at what the first movie did right and double down on those areas. Let’s also look at the areas where that movie failed to connect so we can steer clear and pivot in other directions.”

The ballad of Cole Young may not be entirely over yet, as Slater stresses multiple times in the following Q&A that some of the deceased characters will return in a potential Mortal Kombat III.

“We are not green-lit for a third movie yet. When the initial test screening numbers came back last year and the studio saw how fans were responding to II, I think they realized that there’s a potential here for this to be an ongoing franchise,” Slater shares. “So they commissioned me to start working on a script for III, and I’m finishing a second draft right now. I’m very, very happy with it. In the same way that we took lessons from the first one and tried to make II a much better movie, we’re now taking the lessons from II.”

Once he completes his latest draft of Mortal Kombat III, Slater will turn his attention to his upcoming feature directorial debut, Summoner. He’s been trying to sit in the director’s chair for many years now, and it nearly happened a few years ago on an unproduced Insidious spinoff called Thread.

“I wrote a movie called Summoner that just got the green light. It’s at one of the majors, and they might want to make announcements. But it’s bounced around for a while, and I’ve found the perfect home for it with creative partners that I’m really, really excited about,” Slater says. “So we’re casting at the moment, and I’m hoping to shoot it in August. It’s the scariest thing I’ve ever written, and it’s a very, very fun horror movie.”

Below, during a conversation with THR, Slater also discusses how the first notable figure he met in Hollywood was a screenwriter named James Gunn before touching on their DCU and Coyote vs. Acme collaborations. Then he addresses his exit from the MCU’s Moon Knight series.

***

What was your way onto this sequel? Did you pitch? Or were you offered it given your extensive history with franchise storytelling? 

I was part of a roundtable that New Line brought in to just blue-sky possible storylines for a Mortal Kombat II. It was in the very early days when they still weren’t a hundred percent sure if they were going to make a sequel or not. But I always try to approach roundtables with a pitch in mind. Even if they don’t like it, I just want to have something to contribute.

I basically pitched them what I thought the storyline would be, and I also pitched them a tonal recalibration from the first film in trying to make this movie more fun and more satisfying. I wanted to embrace the humor and the absurdity and the imagination that makes Mortal Kombat special as a franchise. If we did that the right way, then I thought we could make this a really satisfying ’90s blockbuster that you don’t necessarily see so much anymore at the movie theater.

So that was my pitch for the roundtable, and after we were done, they were like, “Would you like to write it? ” And I was like, “Great, now I’m the guy who actually has to figure out all the stuff that I was just cavalierly throwing out as someone else’s problem to deal with.” (Laughs.) But of course, I said yes immediately because I grew up loving these games and these characters.

In terms of preexisting marching orders, did they basically say, “We want a tournament with these specific new characters”? 

It wasn’t even that. There were two promises at the end of the first movie: a tournament is coming, and Johnny Cage is going to be one of the combatants. But beyond that, we had a blank slate. 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.” So I wasn’t interested in continuing the storyline of Cole Young from the first movie. I was like, “Let’s have some brand new protagonists come in here.” And that became Johnny Cage and Kitana.

For Johnny, we needed a movie star [in Karl Urban] and a POV character to ground the insanity of this world for the audience. Kitana [Adeline Rudolph] then became the other very natural protagonist just because of her relationship to Shao Kahn and what she loses in the opening moments of the movie. Everything that Shao Kahn takes from her gives her a really potent and emotional revenge arc throughout the course of that movie. So those two characters really became our bedrock, and while we tried to give everyone else in the movie little fun moments along the way, it was really about servicing Johnny and Kitana’s twin journeys.