Mortal Kombat Sequel Brings Johnny Cage to Life with Karl Urban

Karl Urban has been confirmed as Mortal Kombat’s crass action movie star Johnny Cage. In a new trailer for Mortal Kombat II, Urban is once again flexing his personal brand of grit-and-sweat swagger, this time as a more “meta” version of one of the series’ most iconic fan-favorite characters. It’s a big shift for the saga and an even bigger step on Warner Bros.’s long-shot bid to revitalize the cult video game series as a box office smash.

Urban, who has been playing the mercenary faux-sociopath Billy Butcher on the smash Amazon series The Boys, is sure to be a big draw for fans of his action-heavy and genre-blending work (think Star Trek, Dredd, Jane Doe), but he’s also got exactly the sort of physicality and star power needed to play a character who gets lots of winking, knowingly wacky lines but also still give them the weight and energy they require.

(Urban also has a past with the Mortal Kombat franchise, having had a non-speaking cameo in the 2021 reboot, the first appearance of Cage’s eventual successor Cole Young, played by Lewis Tan.)

But this new version of Johnny Cage is going to be a bit different from the one that we’ve seen and heard about in the comics and games. Sure, he still knows how to throw down, and there’s lots of swagger in Urban’s delivery of the character.

But while Cage has always been most known from the games as the cocky, cool peak-career action star, this version of the character that Urban is playing in Mortal Kombat II is a more self-aware—and also “washed-up”—take on the character that’s very much in keeping with the franchise’s current, increasingly-meta approach.

The new trailer is a follow-up to a fake teaser trailer for Uncaged Fury, the in-universe 1990s Johnny Cage movie that Warner Bros. released yesterday. That VHS-quality fake trailer plays up Cage’s in-universe filmography, complete with silly action set pieces, and implausibly violent martial arts moves. The in-character end credits mention other Cage films, like Cool Hand Cage, Hard to Cage, and Rebel Without a Cage.

Mortal Kombat II is, in addition to a sequel to the reboot film of the same name from 2021, also a direct sequel to the 1995 Mortal Kombat, which introduced Shang Tsung (played by Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), Raiden, and Sonya Blade and ended with the big surprise reveal that Johnny Cage (who had not yet been seen or introduced in the live-action series) would be coming next.

The 2021 reboot was directed by Simon McQuoid, and it was a middling-reviewed, moderately well-performing film that got a follow-up greenlit at Warner Bros. not just because of the return of that same director but because of the presence of Mortal Kombat’s most-popular character, Sub-Zero, who, this time around, will be played by Joe Taslim. (Returnees from the previous movie include Lewis Tan as Cole Young, Ludi Lin as Liu Kang, Mehcad Brooks as Jackson, and Jessica McNamee as Jax.)

With the actor for Johnny Cage now locked, Mortal Kombat II is the fourth-ever live-action Mortal Kombat movie and the first since the original film from 1995, which this year will be 30 years old.

The original live-action Mortal Kombat was well-reviewed and underperformed but with time has since gone on to achieve a status as a campy cult classic (we’d see that word again with both trailers). The long, unbreakable grasp of iconicity on Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa’s performance as Shang Tsung in that movie is a testament to how beloved it still is.

The follow-up to the first Mortal Kombat was 1997’s Mortal Kombat: Annihilation. That movie was not well-liked and failed at the box office, and the series disappeared from theaters. Its publisher Midway soon after would file for bankruptcy, and Warner Bros. would buy the rights. The road to this current Mortal Kombat reboot film has been a long one indeed.

“The mortal battle for Earthrealm’s survival is about to get a lot more personal,” the official synopsis reads of Mortal Kombat II. “The champions of Earthrealm are forced to come together – with the help of none other than Johnny Cage – to prevent Outworld’s evil Emperor Shao Kahn from completing his conquest of Earth in this ultraviolent sequel.” The film, like the first, will have the franchise’s signature R-rated gore, fantastical stakes, and brutally realistic violence.

Fans can bet that Mortal Kombat II is likely to hew closer to the DNA of the games that made the Mortal Kombat series so special than the previous reboot did, given the casting of one of its most-beloved characters as its marquee star.

Mortal Kombat II does not yet have an official release date but is in active production.