'Mortal Kombat II' Starts Brawling on HBO Max Next Week

Mortal Kombat II will punch its way to its streaming home on HBO Max starting July 24, followed by its arrival on HBO linear the next day. Appropriately for the film’s action-packed content, the streaming version will feature an option to watch the film with a variation on American Sign Language called “Visual Vernacular,” which an HBO Max press release calls “a unique sign language form that combines elements of ASL, mime, facial expressions, and body movements to convey highly visual stories.” Mortal Kombat II is directed by Simon McQuoid and written by Jeremy Slater, adapted from the much-loved video game series. In an interview with io9 timed to the film’s release, Slater explained how the approach to the sequel was affected by how fans received the 2021 reboot. The studio, he said, looked closely at what it did right (casting actual martial artists, taking care with the worldbuilding, including satisfying amounts of gore) and also what it did wrong: “The tweaks to the mythology of things like arcana, things like adding a POV character who’s not from the games, were not well received by the fan base, and the fans were very vocal about that,” Slater noted. Those calibrations hel