Mortal Kombat Director Wants More Female Presence In The Sequel, Teases Kitana

By all accounts, a sequel to Mortal Kombat should be getting the green light any day now. Not only has the reboot scored the second-biggest opening weekend of the COVID-19 era behind Godzilla vs. Kong after debuting to a strong $22 million, but fans can’t get enough of the martial arts actioner, which is being called the best video game adaptation ever.

The pic cost just $55 million to make and has almost recouped the budget already from theaters, so the profit margins are definitely going to be healthy enough to justify the investment in more adventures. Mortal Kombat ended on a blatant teaser for the second installment, too, which will see Lewis Tan’s Cole Young and the rest of the surviving heroes look to track down Earthrealm’s next set of defenders, with Johnny Cage not-so-subtly making his presence felt as the film cuts to black.

There’s already been chatter that some big stars could be eyed for the role, but director Simon McQuoid is also keen to introduce another longtime fan favorite into his mythology. In a new interview, not only did the filmmaker reveal that he gets asked about Kitana almost as much as he does Cage, but he’d like to increase the female presence in Mortal Kombat 2 across the board.

“The reason Johnny Cage is not in this original film is he’s such a giant personality that he almost has his own gravitational field. The feeling was that he would throw it out of balance slightly. I get asked about Kitana just as much as Johnny Cage. There’s a lot of interesting characters, story and material to work with. So we haven’t really dug into it; we just know we’re very privileged that’s sitting there. If we do get to that, and I’m not saying we will, I’m just saying if, big ‘if’, then we’ll go down that path. I guess I’d like to shift it to be a little more female. There are some fantastic female characters in Mortal Kombat. And I think we can bring balance there, to a better extent.”

Mortal Kombat featured a handful of female characters, but none of them had a great deal to do with the exception of Jessica McNamee’s Sonya Blade, something McQuoid is evidently keen to rectify. Fans definitely love Kitana, that’s for sure, and after her signature weapons were glimpsed as a background Easter egg, it’s already been established that she’s out there somewhere in the universe.