Exclusive: Karl Urban, Ed Boon, and the rest of the Mortal Kombat II team take us inside a tournament like no other.

Ed Boon is not squeamish about seeing fictional characters face their mortality. As the co-creator of the O.G. Mortal Kombat arcade fighting game from way back in 1992 -- which he developed alongside John Tobias -- Boon plays a direct role in the term "fatality!" becoming shorthand in nerd-culture for a particularly nasty evisceration or disembowelment. The MK guru in fact gets wistful with the ghost of a smile when recalling the first time he realized that he and Tobias could cause their Scorpion sprite to harpoon his opponents with a rope-dart from the palm, impaling the victim and dragging them off to fates unpleasant.

Still, even Boon could feel his heart racing when he saw what the masterminds behind next summer's Mortal Kombat II had brewing for the sequel to the 2021 New Line Cinema movie. Operating under the mission statement that they will at last be able to dramatize the tournament-to-the-death that Mortal Kombat was conceived around, returning director Simon McQuoid and newcomer screenwriter Jeremy Slater had set the name of every major character in the film onto a bracket. There among all those names that Boon was so familiar with from his games were two piles: one was for who lived, and the other for who died. And in each draft of the screenplay, the casualty list shifted.

"There were some choices that they made that they then changed, and a couple of them I was really glad about," Boon says with a grimaced chuckle. "I was thinking, 'Oh I don't want to see this person die!' But there were definitely cards on the table of who's going to be left over, and who's not."

Such are the stakes of a sequel that has taken off its ice-gloves and which is looking to hit the ground running after a visually dazzling, but critically divisive, first film. Yet while 2021's Mortal Kombat largely took place around characters created for the cinema -- and away from the tournament that is the centerstage of the video games -- 2026's MK II is embracing the lore in all its beautiful, deadly grandeur.