Somehow Mortal Kombat 2 Already Became a Victim of Its Own Success

Mortal Kombat will keep dishing out fatalities at the multiplex! A third installment in the revived video game movie franchise has now officially been greenlit, but you’d be quite right in noting that we’re still waiting on its second. It turns out there’s a weird (but good) reason for that: the hype is just too real.

Mortal Kombat II was originally supposed to arrive this month, but has now been pushed back to summer 2026, making it five long years between the first movie and the second. According to the movie’s director, Simon McQuoid, that’s because the highly anticipated sequel is just too darn highly anticipated for its own good, becoming “a victim” of its own success.

“Every time people have seen this movie, it’s gained momentum,” he explained to a crowd at New York Comic Con (via THR). “We’ve created a massive summer blockbuster, so I think we should all be proud of the fact that Mortal Kombat II and the franchise itself is going to kick off next year. Yes, we have to wait, but it’s going to feel massive when it comes out.”

Karl Urban, riding high after the success of Prime Video’s The Boys, will be at the center of the film as Johnny Cage, along with Adeline Rudolph’s Kitana, but Urban teases a different journey for Cage this time around, saying that when we meet the iconic martial arts-loving action film star, “the world has forgotten who Johnny Cage is,” and that he’s “just a broken man.”

In the upcoming sequel, Cage will join the champions of Earthrealm when they’re forced to battle one another to resist the rule of Shao Kahn, but although Cage and Kitana will be hogging a fair amount of screen time, we’ll still be treated to a lot of our other faves in this one, including Jade, Kano, and Scorpion.

Writer Jeremy Slater admits that it’s “daunting” to have so many great Mortal Kombat characters to play with. “It’s a great problem to have when you have a movie with 20 main characters. There’s so much to choose from. You can’t make a six-hour Mortal Kombat movie.”

We suspect a lot of people reading this would disagree. A six-hour Mortal Kombat movie sounds great, honestly. Guess we’ll have to settle for three two-hour movies.

Mortal Kombat II is currently set for release on May 15, 2026.