Mortal Kombat should be a TV series. The games show why.

Ed Boon and John Tobias created Mortal Kombat as a Midway arcade game in 1992. Tie-in books and comics followed, but the games remain the franchise’s primary story source. Counting Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe, there are twelve principal fighting games through Mortal Kombat 1 in 2023, excluding revised editions and spin-offs.

The way they tell their stories has changed. The early games relied heavily on character biographies and individual endings. Later games added adventure modes. Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe used a cinematic story mode in 2008, and the NetherRealm games that followed built their campaigns around chapters led by different fighters.

The franchise doesn’t tell one unbroken story. It has reboots, rewritten histories and competing timelines. What stays the same is the ensemble: the story moves on whenever the player takes control of someone new.

The base story modes in Mortal Kombat (2011), Mortal Kombat X, Mortal Kombat 11 and Mortal Kombat 1 contain 55 chapters altogether.

This counts numbered chapters in the base campaigns only. It excludes Mortal Kombat 11: Aftermath and Mortal Kombat 1: Khaos Reigns. A shared chapter counts once, and Mortal Kombat 1’s selectable final chapter also counts once. The chart shows how the stories are built, not how much screen time or importance each fighter gets.

Johnny Cage, Liu Kang, Raiden, Kitana and other familiar characters take turns carrying the action. Some chapters offer a choice between fighters. A chapter is not a television episode, but the games repeatedly make the same useful decision: let us spend a stretch of the story with one person before moving on.

That is the part a series could borrow.

The films are drawing on characters whose stories have been revised and expanded for decades. The details depend on which timeline you follow, and an adaptation would have to pick one instead of piling them together.

Liu Kang is the original tournament champion. Later stories kill him, return him as a revenant and eventually combine his power with Raiden’s to create Fire God Liu Kang. Mortal Kombat 1 then follows the world he has remade.

Kitana’s history involves Edenia, Shao Kahn’s conquest and the truth about her family. Her relationship with Mileena changes between continuities: a clone in the earlier story becomes her sister in the new era. Johnny Cage’s story eventually extends to his marriage to Sonya and their daughter Cassie.

Scorpion needs the same care. Hanzo Hasashi wears the mask in the earlier continuity and the recent films. Mortal Kombat 1 gives that identity to Kuai Liang. A series would need to decide which story it was telling, then give its version time to develop.

Any of those relationships could sustain more than the few scenes a crowded film can spare.

Mortal Kombat II brings back or introduces at least 18 named characters, including Johnny Cage (Karl Urban), Kitana (Adeline Rudolph), Shao Kahn (Martyn Ford) and Quan Chi (Damon Herriman). In roughly two hours it also has to fit in the tournament, the trip into the Netherrealm and the explanation of the amulet.

You can see the squeeze on screen. Johnny’s attempt to find a purpose after his career collapses is one of the film’s more interesting ideas, and it gets little room. Liu Kang (Ludi Lin) has major fights, but his friendship with Kung Lao has to do a lot of emotional work in relatively few scenes. Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee), Jax (Mehcad Brooks) and Raiden (Tadanobu Asano) compete for what is left.

As our Mortal Kombat II review argues, it can feel as if everyone is a supporting character. More running time would not automatically solve that. A series would still need to choose whose story comes first. It would at least have more room to follow the choice through.

The animated Defenders of the Realm ran for 13 episodes in 1996. The live-action Mortal Kombat: Conquest ran for 22 episodes in 1998 and 1999 and ended on a cliffhanger.

Kevin Tancharoen’s Mortal Kombat: Legacy offers a more useful structural example. Its nine-episode first season in 2011 divides its attention between character stories: Jax, Sonya and Kano, then Johnny Cage, then Kitana and Mileena, then Raiden, then Scorpion and Sub-Zero, and finally Cyrax and Sektor.

Those short episodes don’t prove a big-budget series would succeed. They do show a shape that could work: follow the fighters separately, establish what they want, then bring them together.

The Last of Us won eight awards at the delayed 2023 Creative Arts Emmys, held in January 2024. Arcane won Outstanding Animated Program in 2022. Amazon renewed Fallout for a second season on 18 April 2024, roughly a week after its premiere.

None of that proves every game belongs on television. The useful part is how the format handles a big cast. Arcane can stay with a fractured relationship across episodes. Fallout can follow separate journeys before making their connections clear. Mortal Kombat has the same need to make several people matter before they collide.

One season could build towards a single tournament. The early episodes would follow the fighters on their way in: Johnny losing his career, Kitana living a double life in Shao Kahn’s court, Liu Kang and Kung Lao training together, and the history between Scorpion and Sub-Zero.

Once the tournament began, an episode could stay with one or two contests and the relationships behind them.

By the time Liu Kang faced Kung Lao, we would have spent hours with both. The fight could draw on that history instead of asking the audience to supply it. A death would have more chance to register as a loss before the next name appeared on the scoreboard.

There is a fair argument the other way. Conquest ended after one season, and Legacy did not become a long-running series. A larger production would have to pay for fights, effects and otherworldly locations across several episodes. Extra time is expensive, and it can just as easily become padding.

A cinema release also has an appeal of its own. Some fans want big fights on a big screen, two hours, done. The games’ rotating viewpoints do not prevent a film from choosing a lead and building a tighter story around them.

Mortal Kombat II earned approximately $129.6 million worldwide against a reported $80 million production budget. That is ticket sales, not profit, and it doesn’t settle what the franchise does next. Our Mortal Kombat 3 status article covers the current position.