'Mortal Kombat 2' Chooses New Fighters With Karl Urban As Johnny Cage And Two More
Two 'Chilling Adventures of Sabrina' alums have also been cast
The Mortal Kombat sequel has found three new fighters: Johnny Cage, Kitana, and Jade. Cage, in particular, is among the video games’ most popular and was teased at the end of the first film, seen on a poster for one of his in-universe movies.
Karl Urban, currently starring as Billy Butcher in Prime Video’s The Boys, will play Johnny Cage. He is an action movie star who enters the Mortal Kombat tournament in order to prove to his critics that he is able to do his own stunts. Whether that specific motivation sticks for this iteration remains to be seen. The first film didn’t actually chronicle any edition of the tournament but instead the lightning god Raiden, played by Tadanobu Asano, assigned Cole Young, played by Lewis Tan to collect entrants to fight off Shang Tsung played by Chin Han, and his forces. Tati Gabrielle, who is known for her work in You, The 100, as Prudence Night on The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and the voice of Willow on The Owl House, will play Jade, an assassin who is a friend and bodyguard to Kitana, Princess of the realm of Edenia. Kitana will be played by Adeline Rudolph, forming a reunion of sorts as she played fellow Weird Sister Agatha on Sabrina. The two have a complex history in either continuity of the games.
Simon McQuoid, who directed the previous movie, released in 2021 is back for this one, where Cage will lead. The majority of the main stars of the first film are expected to return, with Tan as Cole and Jessica McNamee as Sonya Blade explicitly named. In the modern games’ continuity, Sonya and Cage marry and have a daughter. This sequel is written by Jeremy Slater, whose credits include Moon Knight and The Umbrella Academy. It continues the story of a group of fighters trained in martial arts to defend our reality, the Earthrealm, against the Outworld. Urban is probably best known in film as Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy in the Kelvin timeline Star Trek films, Judge Dredd in Dredd, Éomer in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings films, and Skurge in Thor: Ragnarok. He also voiced Jacob Holland, the lead in the Oscar-nominated animated film The Sea Beast. The first film, a 2021 release by Warner Bros., was one of the parts of Project Popcorn’s day-and-date simultaneous releases to theaters and HBO Max during the pandemic and was one of the biggest successes during it.
