‘Mortal Kombat’ Doesn’t Have a Post-Credit Scene — So Will There Be a Sequel?

Filmmakers have used post- and even mid-credits scenes to incentivize moviegoers to stick around and watch the credits at the end of a film, as anyone who has sat through the end titles of a Marvel or a Pirates of the Caribbean movie can attest. And a lot of times, these bonus scenes tease sequels. 

So, does the new big-screen video game adaptation Mortal Kombat have a post-credit scene?

In a word, no. The filmmakers of the new Warner Bros. movie — which is currently playing in theaters and streaming on HBO Max — considered a post-credit scene but decided to buck the trend. But that doesn’t mean the film doesn’t set up a sequel …

In an interview with Collider, director Simon McQuoid — who’s making his feature film debut with this movie — told fans not to expect a post-credit scene at the end of Mortal Kombat. “Yeah, we talked about it, but we never wanted to do anything just for the sake of doing what everyone else does,” he said.

Simon said that he and his colleagues were satisfied with the ending that plays out before the credits start rolling: “We really knew we had something original here. No one at the studio and none of us ever felt like, ‘Oh, we’ve gotta do that.’ It was just more like, ‘What’s right for our story?’ and ‘What’s right for this movie?’ So it was talked about, there were ideas, but once that ending locked in, we were like, ‘OK, great’.”

Mortal Kombat — starring Lewis Tan, Jessica McNamee, and Josh Lawson, among others — just hit theaters and HBO Max on April 23. And some box office analysts are expecting it to be a pandemic-era win for Warner Bros., buoying hopes that the movie studio will green-light a sequel.

And Simon is already thinking that far ahead, especially because Mortal Kombat ends with the heroes discussing finding another fighter — namely, the character Johnny Cage from the video game franchise — to compete in the forthcoming Mortal Kombat tournament.

“Movie one, we were always kind of setting this up as — well, I was setting it up, it’s basically in my head — I always saw [movie one] as pre-tournament, then [movie two is] hopefully tournament, then [movie three is] post-tournament,” Simon told Collider. “So the idea was that this was going to be a pre-tournament movie that would hopefully sow the seeds for the tournament, the final.”

It helps that this Mortal Kombat film has better reviews, on average, than its 1995 predecessor, also named Mortal Kombat, or that film’s 1997 sequel, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation. The 1995 film has a 43% Tomatometer score, the 1997 sequel has a 2% score, and this 2021 reboot has a 56% score.

“Largely for fans of the source material but far from fatal(ity) flawed, Mortal Kombat revives the franchise in appropriately violent fashion,” the site’s critical consensus reads.

Rolling Stone’s K. Austin Collins, meanwhile, says the new movie is “solid entertainment — refreshing, even, for finding ways to navigate the familiar pivots on its own terms. Most importantly, it does what is, ultimately, its main job. It tees us up for the sequel. And plenty of us will be eager to watch it.”