From Camp to Kombat: Urban Reboots Johnny Cage for MK Fans

Karl Urban is trading in his Boys Butcher’s coat for designer shades in the upcoming Mortal Kombat II. The Lord of the Rings and Star Trek alum is stepping into the boots of Johnny Cage, the bravado-filled martial arts movie star who’s a fan favorite from the long-running video game franchise. The sequel comes on the heels of Warner Bros.’ 2021 Mortal Kombat reboot, and it’s the fourth live-action Mortal Kombat film to be made after the original’s 1995 release.

The release date for the trailer was particularly sly on the marketing front—it hit just one day after Warner Bros. dropped an entirely fake in-universe trailer for Uncaged Fury, a cheeseball ’90s-style action flick “starring” Johnny Cage himself. The trailer was loaded with mock meta humor, referencing Cage’s other fake film roles like Cool Hand Cage, Hard to Cage, and Rebel Without a Cage.

The 30th anniversary of the first live-action Mortal Kombat arrives in 2025, which may be at least a small part of why Warner Bros. has this sequel in the works. The original, despite bombing with critics upon release, did solid business at the box office and has since attained cult classic status for the genre. The performance of Cary Hiroyuki Tagawa as the sorcerer Shang Tsung remains a fan-favorite and some might even say definitive. But its sequel, 1997’s Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, was a critical and commercial bomb that led the game’s publisher, Midway, to go bankrupt soon after.

After buying the rights to the property, Warner Bros. enlisted Simon McQuoid to helm a reboot, which hit theaters just over two decades after the original film’s release. The 2021 Mortal Kombat reboot gave fans Lewis Tan’s Cole Young, an MMA fighter who becomes part of a larger conflict involving two battling realms for Earth’s future. Reviews were mixed, but it performed enough at the box office to warrant a sequel, this time again directed by McQuoid. The first film ended with Cole traveling to Los Angeles to recruit Johnny Cage, so he’s picking up right where that left off.

The trailer for Mortal Kombat II dumps us right in the thick of things; the official synopsis for the film assumes that audiences are already familiar with the events of the first film. The champions, who have since been joined by Cage, are now taking part in an all-out, no-holds-barred battle to defeat Shao Kahn and prevent him from conquering Earthrealm. Failure would mean the end of Earthrealm itself.

Lewis Tan, Jessica McNamee, Joe Taslim, Tadanobu Asano, Josh Lawson, Ludi Lin, Mehcad Brooks, Chin Han, Hiroyuki Sanada, and Max Huang from the 2021 reboot will be reprising their roles as Cole Young, Sonya Blade, Bi-Han/Noob Saibot (aka Sub-Zero), Lord Raiden, Kano, Liu Kang, Jax Briggs, Shang Tsung, Scorpion, and Kung Lao, respectively.

Joining them is a new cast of fighters, including Adeline Rudolph as Kitana, Tati Gabrielle as Jade, Damon Herriman (who voiced Kabal in the last film) as Quan Chi, Martyn Ford as Shao Kahn, CJ Bloomfield as Baraka, Desmond Chiam as King Jerrod, and Ana Thu Nguyen as Queen Sindel.

The trailer does a great job of showing off Cage’s character with a wink and a nod to his shtick. In the first shot, he’s sitting in a dive bar when a kid approaches him, saying that he “loved Citizen Cage as a kid.” “They should do a reboot!” he yells. Cage says that “nobody wants that” and a “career at its peak, dies out” while looking bitter and defeated in the scene, and follows up by saying that his kind of movies “don’t get made anymore after the 90s.”

Raiden and Sonya approach Cage to tell him that “you have been chosen to fight,” to which he laughs it off as if they’re just two overzealous fans who want an autograph. It’s not until he’s zapped to some otherworldly place to compete in what he’s told is a “fighting tournament to the death” that he understands what’s going on. “F— that,” he deadpans. Cage protests that he has no supernatural abilities and that “I’m just incredibly handsome,” but he quickly jumps on board when he learns that Earthrealm’s existence is at stake. He does make the request, however, to please “don’t hurt my face, guys.”

The trailer delivers exactly what Mortal Kombat fans should expect—stylized combat, plenty of blood and signature finishing moves, and iconic catchphrases like “Get over here!” from Scorpion. The Mortal Kombat video game series has never been the subtlest when it comes to graphic violence, and it’s become self-aware enough of its schlocky violence to wink at itself in this trailer. It’s these moments of self-aware humor that I think will make the film fan service gold, and it’ll do well with the die-hard fan base for the franchise. But, at least from what we’ve seen so far, I’m not sure it does a lot to cross over.

Mortal Kombat II will be in theaters on October 24, 2025.