Mortal Kombat 2 and Liu Kang’s confusing fate, explained

Mortal Kombat 2 is full of dismemberment, decapitations, and death. It’s also replete with characters from 2021’s Mortal Kombat who’ve been brought back from the dead, like Josh Lawson’s Kano, or newly made undead, like Kung Lao (Max Huang) and Sindel (Ana Thu Nguyen). Their returns happen in ways that are authentic to the fighting game series.

But moviegoers may understandably be confused about what happens to Liu Kang (Ludi Lin) in Mortal Kombat 2. His fate is different from the other competitors who fall in the Mortal Kombat tournament between Earthrealm and Outworld. Liu Kang’s future role in the film series is left unclear, especially when you look at the complicated history of the Mortal Kombat video game franchise timeline.

So what do the climactic events of Mortal Kombat 2 mean for the film franchise, including an all-but-confirmed Mortal Kombat 3 movie? What does it all mean for Liu Kang? Let’s dive in.

[Ed. note: Significant spoilers ahead for several characters’ deaths in Mortal Kombat 2.]

Shao Kahn vs Liu Kang in Mortal Kombat 2

Mortal Kombat 2’s ultimate bad guy, Shao Kahn (Martyn Ford), does his fair share of killing in the film. He turns Cole Young’s head into sauce with his giant war hammer, and stabs poor Jax through the neck with the opposite end of his signature weapon. Shao Kahn also deals a seemingly fatal wound to Liu Kang in the final act of Mortal Kombat 2, though the Earthrealm champion doesn’t appear to die: His body transforms into flame, not a flesh-and-blood corpse. Liu Kang also says that if Shao Kahn strikes him down, he’ll become more powerful than the Kahn can possibly imagine. (I’m paraphrasing.) Like a phoenix rising from Edenia’s town square, Liu Kang pledges to rescue Kung Lao from the afterlife.

Though it’s unclear whether he’s dead-dead after his final encounter with Shao Kahn, Liu Kang has been killed off in Mortal Kombat games before with major repercussions. In 2002’s Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance, wizards Shang Tsung and Quan Chi murder Liu, and he’s resurrected as a deadly revenant (Mortal Kombat’s equivalent of a zombie). Liu Kang’s spirit continued to linger as a separate entity, with the goal of reuniting with his physical form. Ultimately, in part due to other character deaths, Liu Kang’s physical and spiritual forms both pass on.

In 2011’s soft reboot of the MK game franchise, known confusingly as just Mortal Kombat, Liu Kang is back in human form, serving as one of Raiden’s champions. In that game’s remix of the events of the first three MK games, he is ultimately killed (again), this time accidentally by Raiden. But Liu Kang is once again resurrected in revenant form by Quan Chi in this alternate timeline. In the next game, Mortal Kombat X, revenant versions of Liu Kang and Kitana become the new rulers of Netherrealm, the franchise’s version of Hell, basically.

Finally, after a fresh batch of timeline shenanigans in 2019’s Mortal Kombat 11 and its Aftermath expansion, Raiden, Liu Kang (revenant version), and Liu Kang (zapped in from another timeline version) are fused to become one guy, Fire God Liu Kang. It’s a human-god-zombie throuple become one. This version of Liu Kang then takes control of the entire Mortal Kombat timeline and starts the whole thing over again, remade in his vision. This is the basis of 2023’s Mortal Kombat 1, which, yes, is the sequel to Mortal Kombat 11.

While Mortal Kombat 2 (the movie) doesn’t go to these confusing lengths to explain how Liu Kang — a pretty good martial artist with some impressive fire powers — might wind up becoming a god like Raiden, that does seem to be the direction the film franchise is heading in. Liu Kang has ascended as a fire-powered being who has thrown off that ol’ mortal coil, and is now… something else.

Mortal Kombat 2’s ending implies that the surviving kombatants have a plan to bring their friends back from death — either from the Netherrealm, from revenant form, or from the afterlife, depending on the person. While the wizard Quan Chi will probably be responsible for a good portion of that necromancy, Liu Kang also clearly has a new part to play. Since he pledged to set things right with Kung Lao right before he split open his former friend’s torso with Kung Lao’s own sawblade-hat, we might have a rough outline of the plot of Mortal Kombat 3.