Karl Urban’s Johnny Cage Debuts in First Mortal Kombat II Photos

2021’s Mortal Kombat ended with a tease promising that a sequel would add preening Hollywood star (and Mortal Kombat game veteran) Johnny Cage to the mix of characters. Sure enough, here is the sequel — which is officially titled Mortal Kombat II with Roman numerals, in keeping with the style of the old fighting games — and there is Karl Urban as the new Johnny Cage. (In the ’90s Mortal Kombat movies, he was played by Linden Ashby an Chris Conrad.)

The last Kombat movie introduced a totally new character at the center of the story — Lewis Tan’s Cole Young — fighting in yet another version of the supernatural Mortal Kombat tournament alongside franchise stapes like Sub-Zero, Scorpion, Liu Kang, Jax, and Kung Lao. The sequel adds Cage, as well as other fan-favorite fighters like Kitana, Shao Kahn, and Baraka.

You can see some of the characters in the first batch of photos from the sequel. It’s directed by Simon McQuoid, who also directed 2021’s Mortal Kombat.

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The first Mortal Kombat was one of the Warner Bros. movies that debuted on (HBO) Max at the same time it opened in theaters during the Covid pandemic. As a result, it wasn’t a massive box-office hit — it grossed around $85 million worldwide — but it supposedly proved very popular on streaming, which is a big reason why Warners decided to move forward with a sequel. (The addition of Urban as Cage is surely an attempt to add a little more star power to a series that mostly relied on the franchise itself to bring in customers the first time around.)

Mortal Kombat II is scheduled to open in theaters on October 24, 2025.