Released to theatres and the HBO Max streaming service on the same day in April of 2021, the video game movie Mortal Kombat was a financial success, pulling in almost $85 million at the global box office and exceeding expectations on HBO Max, where it ranks among the top feature titles on the service. So of course Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema are moving forward with a sequel – and today, Deadline reports that Mortal Kombat director Simon McQuoid is returning to the helm for the sequel.
The first bit of Mortal Kombat sequel news came earlier this year, when it was announced that Jeremy Slater, who was the lead writer on the Marvel / Disney+ series Moon Knight, had been hired to write the screenplay. A couple months ago, Slater said that working on the project had been
really fun so far. We’re about halfway through the script. I’m working really closely with the director and the studios, and the game guys, and I think—I can’t say anything about the actual story, but I think they definitely learned some lessons the last time around in terms of, ‘Here’s the stuff fans responded to, and here’s what people liked out of the movie, and here’s the stuff that didn’t work out as well as we hoped.’ … (The sequel is) the chance to take everything that worked in the first one and do it even better and give the audience even more, and make something that is just incredibly satisfying, and really exciting, and unpredictable.”
As you can see, Slater mentioned working with “the director” back then, but we didn’t know who was the director was at that point. Deadline notes that as soon as studio executives put a Mortal Kombat 2 (as we’ll call it for now) into development, “one of the first orders of business was bringing McQuoid back to direct.”
Mortal Kombat was McQuoid’s feature directorial debut. Mortal Kombat 2 isn’t the only project the director has in the works, as he recently signed on to direct a sci-fi movie called Omega as well.
Are you glad to hear that McQuoid will be back at the helm for the Mortal Kombat sequel? Let us know by leaving a comment below.