One of the biggest complaints about the new Mortal Kombat, in theaters and on HBO Max as of last Friday, is that there’s no actual tournament. While the modern video game adaptation does uniquely plant several of the fighters in head-to-head combat, the plotline revolves around Shang Tsung cheating his way into winning prior to the planned tournament.

In short, Mortal Kombat feels more like a prequel that sets the stage for the big event. This was always the plan, co-writer Greg Russo tells Collider.

“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.

“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.”

Can you imagine if Bloodsport was just Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Frank Dux trying out for the tournament? Eesh.

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Digressing, Russo admits that he was stuck focusing on the sequels because of the number of characters in the Mortal Kombat universe and going into full-on Avengers mode.

“Everybody was focused on movie one, right? You don’t get a trilogy without it. But as a writer, you should never be painting yourself in a corner, that’s my motto,” adds Russo. “You should always be thinking about ‘Where can your story go even beyond the two hours — this is not a lot of time — that I have to tell this story? Where else can it go?’ So I always saw it as leading up to something bigger. And so the idea then became, alright, we have a certain amount of characters we can fit, don’t have the luxury of having individual movies of all these characters, I’m getting thrown right into Avengers mode, which is fun and a challenge. But I knew that there were other characters I just couldn’t get in, and it actually didn’t even make sense to bring in yet for the story. So then it became a matter of, ‘Well, who’s the big characters that we wanna save?’ ‘Cause you also don’t wanna use everything.”

Spoiler warning. As for one of the characters he’s referring to, Russo is hopeful we’ll see ‘Citizen Cage’ in the next film, although you can read all about that over at Collider.

The biggest question mark is as to whether or not we’ll actually get a Mortal Kombat sequel, and I think that the box office opening indicates that yes, we will.