Mortal Kombat II Levels Franchise Up into New Realms Where No One Is Safe

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.

“What was so great about the first one was it really showed what was working, what wasn’t, and what the fans really responded to and really loved. So we very much had our marching orders on this one,” Slater says about what he found while coming into the project. He and McQuoid were especially taken by the prospect of expanding on the first film’s universally praised wuxia opening sequence wherein legendary Hiroyuki Sanada’s Scorpion enters into a life-altering blood feud with Sub-Zero (Joe Taslim, who returns in the sequel as Sub-Zero’s brother Bi-Han).

Says the director, “My goal was the next film to feel like a full feature [version] of the first film’s opening scene…. let’s just let it rip and swing for the fences in this one.” That means more characters; more realms; more powers; and more deaths.

“The tricky thing is because it’s Mortal Kombat, the fights are to the death,” Slater observes, “and that makes any tournament very complicated when you have a lot of good guys, a lot of bad guys, and are figuring out the calculus of who needs to fight who at what point in this movie. Who needs to survive, and who is sadly not going to make it out.”

The results of such coldblooded scorekeeping, however, are reportedly quite pleasing. Research screenings went so well that Warners/New Line bullishly moved the hard-R sequel from an October 2025 release to the height of summer movie season next May. Now fans will have to wait a little longer to find out who lives and dies.

“There’s a Game of Thrones element where you can’t believe they killed off somebody,” Boon says. Nobody, not even fan favorites, are safe.

Breaking the Cage

When it comes to the world of Mortal Kombat there are fan favorites, and there are fan favorites. Then there is Johnny Cage, the movie star turned inter-dimensional tournament champion that’s been winning over players since the ‘90s with his smooth hair, slick one-liners, and oh, so cool shades.

“Not all sunglasses are created equal,” quips actor Karl Urban about selecting the fabled eyewear in Mortal Kombat II. “But I think we landed on a pretty good spot. And I did [keep them]. I steal as much shit as I can, so they came home.”

Urban’s line is acerbic and witty, which is to say befitting of a character who fans have often rallied behind, sometimes to the surprise of his creators. According to Boon, they had no idea that Cage—a character loosely based on Jean-Claude Van Damme—would resonate with players so much when other avatars included guys who can turn opponents into popsicles or shoot lightning from their fingertips. There is something though about the cocksure arrogance of Johnny that matched the ‘90s aesthetic. It’s also an aesthetic that Mortal Kombat II will eagerly dissect by making Johnny one of the central heroes, and casting no less than Urban in the role—the respected genre darling star of everything from Lord of the Rings to Dredd and The Boys. By design, this is unlike any previous Johnny that fans have seen.

“A lot of it was looking at the modern movie landscape,” Slater explains about the movie’s take on Cage. “Would a guy who specializes in these sort of Jean-Claude Van Damme action movies, would he still be the biggest movie star in the world? Is there something more interesting about a guy who used to have it all, and have it sort of slip through his fingers? That was the conversation we all had at the beginning.”

It was also one Urban could appreciate. Having gotten his earliest start in the industry in the ‘90s when the native New Zealander was appearing in Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert’s Hercules and Xena shows, Urban recalls well the era when a movie star’s name above the title was arguably more important than the title itself.

“There were so many great examples of martial arts stars in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s,” says Urban. “Obviously Van Damme was a huge inspiration not only for myself, but also Ed Boon and the creators. So I cherrypicked and stole a few things from a lot of those guys, Harrison Ford, Stallone, and Schwarzenegger. Johnny Cage in this movie, he was almost a contemporary of those guys—not quite on that A-level, but he was right there for a minute, and it all evaporated.”

McQuoid was pleased to get Urban to play this guy too, because so much of the joy of Johnny is his humor and quick wit, which can be communicated in a handful of cutscenes in a video game. In McQuoid’s mind, few actors are as precise at walking the line between a comically ingratiating swagger, and true dimensionality.

Says the director, “Look at what he did with Bones in Star Trek. You could say that Bones was one of the broader characters in Star Trek, always one-liners and jokes and such, and the way Karl sort of kept a lid on that made it funny, made it a joy to watch, but it felt like it was a real character. He’s done the same thing with Johnny where I think there’s immense satisfaction in making a much loved character feel real now.”

They even had some meta fun by filming faux movie scenes that harken back to Johnny’s glory days in the ‘90s with titles like Uncaged Fury and Cool Hand Cage.

“I really hope if we go for the sequel we get to see more of these,” Urban laughs. “We shot this Uncaged Fury movie—that is a movie-within-a-movie—and [all my co-stars] came to set on the day that we shot it, and we shot it on film. It was a real throwback.”

A Whole New World of Pain

If the mission statement for Mortal Kombat II is to go bigger, bloodier, and into the tournament, then for director McQuoid it also became about getting all that throwback detail that fans crave, and then adding teeth. In early discussions, the goal was to try to include every realm that has appeared in a Mortal Kombat title. While that perhaps proved too ambitious (for now), the filmmaker sure found room for a hell of a lot. And what ends up on the screen is exacting in its detail.

“Take the Pit,” McQuoid says. The director knew from the offset he wanted to have a brutal fight sequence to the death occur in that space, and apparently surprised his team when he said they have to do it exactly as how it appeared in the Sega Genesis version of Mortal Kombat from 1992. “Everyone was like ‘what about changing this?’ And [I said], ‘No, no. We’re just doing that on a massive scale.’ So it’s brutal concrete, all the spears are on the poles. The spikes are the same. I wanted it to feel like something I know so well, but I’ve never seen it like that.”

The same might apply to other fan favorite characters who are making the jump to the big screen, and for some of them, it’s the first time. That includes ninja assassin Jade (Tati Gabrielle), who never appeared in the ‘90s movies or TV show, as well as newer and more faithful renditions of Shao Khan (Martyn Ford), the evil emperor of Outworld, and Kitana (Adeline Rudolph), the Edenian princess whose throne was stolen and perverted by Shao Khan.

“Jade [was my favorite] since I was a kid,” Gabrielle says about her fandom for this world. “When I was young, I would always play as Jade, because, one, I saw myself in her, and two, I’m a Black woman who does karate. I did karate for 12 years, and I also used the bo staff, that was my weapon of choice.”

According to Gabrielle, she never anticipated that she would get to use that skillset in a movie, and yet there she was on set wielding a bo against Rudolph in more than one scene. “It was really fun to relearn, because I did do a different style of bo staff for the film than I originally trained with growing up. It was incredibly difficult, the bo staffs we used for the film were heavier than a traditional bo staff would be, so it was a lot of strain on my shoulder, a lot of finding new muscles.”

Yet it was also finding old ones, and connecting with what Rudolph calls a shared empathy for the characters. In fact, in playing what are essentially estranged sisters in Mortal Kombat II, Gabrielle and Rudolph rekindled a dynamic they had after working together for years on Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.

“When you know someone so well as a person, and you adore them like with Tati, it’s nice to be on set and feel free to not be hesitant about any notes or things you might need, or things you want to give,” Rudolph says. “Having that chemistry there already was nice, because we got to skip the building chemistry and go straight to building character and how do we want to develop this together.”

In the role of their emperor, the imposingly tall Ford (who stands at six feet, eight inches) acknowledges there is a certain amount of pressure about bringing these characters to life in a way fans will recognize. This would include Ford, who’s favorite character growing up was Baraka “just for the pure brutality.” This led to him estimating they spent more time training than they did shooting the movie. Nonetheless, there are some things you cannot prepare for.

“The first day I was on set, I realized how much I was going to sweat in the costume,” Ford says. The costume he is referring to is a prosthetic and makeup wonder that could only be achieved after spending about five hours in a chair to have the armor and accoutrements applied. And then they put a hammer in his reach. “So the sweat is coming out of my hands, Simon is shouting action, and I’m swinging the hammer, and the hammer flew out of my hands and smashed my lights. That was one of the days where you realize you can’t practice or train for everything.”

Forever Franchise

When Mortal Kombat II reaches theaters next year, it will be in a film that Urban estimates will be the best representation of the fighting games ever brought to cinema. And the aim is to have produced something that Rudolph suggests will let “fans’ inner child come out beaming, running out of that theater.” Yet there are still realms that will be left to traverse, and stories untold. For the man who created it all, that’s kind of the point.

Says Boon: “There’s this phrase we use, which is a ‘forever franchise.’ Like DC will always exist; Marvel will always exist; Star Wars will. We hope that Mortal Kombat at least approaches something like that. We have 80, 100 characters who exist in our universe, so there’s a lot for these guys to draw from if they make another film. I think there is so much more potential. It’s the tip of the iceberg.” And like in the arcades of yore, it is designed to leave you eager to punch continue.

Mortal Kombat II reaches theaters on May 8, 2026.