This post contains spoilers for the end of 2021’s Mortal Kombat.

Simon McQuoid knows that taking on the reboot of Mortal Kombat for his first-ever Hollywood directing gig sounds like a brash, kinda nutty decision. “‘What were you thinking?'” quipped McQuoid, whose past work on commercials, many of which were for video games like Call of Duty or consoles, were no small production feats. “When I first saw the Mortal Kombat script, I felt that there was an opportunity to elevate this into a really beautiful, brutal, big, fun, cinematic experience that this title had never been to before. And that was a very exciting prospect for me.”

The result of that cool confidence is a fist-pumping success, a blood-soaked sparring spree that includes fun interpretations of some of the games’ most famous fighters from the Nine Realms-Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee), Kano (Josh Lawson), Liu Kang (Ludi Lin), Goro (CGI), etc.-and introduces a brand-new character, Cole (Lewis Tan), as the movie’s bloodline, quite literally, leading viewers toward the big showdown between the icy ass-kicker Bi-Han/Sub-Zero (Joe Taslim) and Hanzo/Scorpion (Hiroyuki Sanada), summoned fresh out of Hell.

But notably missing from the roster here is the slugger and action star, the centre of Paul W.S. Anderson’s 1995 Mortal Kombat adaptation, Johnny Cage-that is, until the final seconds of the movie before the credits roll. Having beaten back the Outworld champions, who tried to sabotage the millennia-old tournament before it even started, Cole and co. are setting off to find Earthrealm’s successors. Cole says he’s off to Hollywood before the camera pans to a movie poster hanging on the wall sporting, very largely, the credit “Johnny Cage.” (I, personally, SCREAMED.)

It’s a brief moment that raises approximately one hundred questions, chiefly: Does that mean we’re getting a sequel?? Was McQuoid’s entry meant to serve as a sort of prequel when you also consider, in the games’ canon (kanon?), that Bi-Han’s younger brother Kuai Liang picks up the Sub-Zero mantle? Who else might show up? (“I get asked about Kitana just as much as I get asked about Johnny Cage,” McQuoid said.)

Believe it or not, no: A sequel was not necessarily top of mind for McQuoid and his team. “We really didn’t dig in too much to any sequel talk,” he said. “We just didn’t talk about it. We understood the importance of Johnny Cage, and we knew he was too big a personality to put in the film that we were trying to build a foundation for. But we also knew we wanted to lead to him and make sure he was looked after.”

Still, one of the main criticisms lodged at the film thus far is how a certain follow-up felt baked in, an overcalculated attempt to start up yet another new franchise of existing IP. McQuoid would bristle at that insinuation, asserting that the Johnny Cage tease was just an on ramp for something more-if the fans wanted it. (We want.)

“We didn’t want to be so presumptuous that we thought, ‘Oh, we’ve nailed it, obviously.’ No one ever thinks that. That is the worst thing we can do,” McQuoid said. “But we knew that we needed to lay a few little rails out for potential. That’s all it is: It’s potential.”

Leanne Butkovic is an entertainment editor at Thrillist.