IGN just debuted the newest trailer for Mortal Kombat 2, which hits theaters on May 8, 2026. Like the first, this trailer focuses heavily on Karl Urban’s Johnny Cage, one of the new kombatants joining the fight in the sequel. All signs point to Johnny being the de facto main character this time around, and we think that’s a very good sign for the movie.
Let’s break down where 2021’s Mortal Kombat went astray and why the sequel is showing every sign of getting back on track, with a lot of help from Mr. JC himself.
Why 2021’s Mortal Kombat Didn’t Quite Work
1995’s Mortal Kombat still stands as one of the best live-action video game movies released so far. It says a lot about the state of the genre that it peaked so early and has had so little to offer since, but there’s no denying the fact that MK ’95 just got a lot right. It faithfully adapted the premise of the games, basically playing out like a more high-concept version of Enter the Dragon.
And crucially, it did so by striking just the right tone with the source material. The 1995 film is nothing if not a campy, silly martial arts romp. It’s got multicolored ninjas, a rubber, four-armed miniboss monster, and Christopher Lambert hamming it up as a thunder god. It’s got a mid-’90s techno/industrial mash-up soundtrack that goes way harder than it has any right to. The movie treats the source material with reverence, but it never behaves as if that source material is high art. Mortal Kombat is best when it allows itself to be silly and campy.
That’s something the franchise occasionally loses sight of. Certainly, the less said about the dreadful mess that is 1997’s Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, the better. The games themselves have tended to strike the right balance between building up the surprisingly complex lore of this universe and wallowing in the campiness of it all. But then you have something like DC’s Mortal Kombat X prequel comic, which became entirely too enamored with said lore and forgot to just tell a fun, goofy story about colorfully clad fighters eviscerating one another.
Mortal Kombat II: Official Posters
That’s an area where the 2021 movie reboot never really found its footing. On paper, the reboot had a lot going for it. It had much better special effects and production values than its predecessors. It also took a fairly novel approach to the script, focusing not on the interdimensional martial arts tournament, but on the eternal rivalry between Hiroyuki Sanada’s Scorpion and Joe Taslim’s Sub-Zero. In a perfect world, the reboot would have been a great showcase for how far the video game movie genre has come since 1995.
But in execution, not all the right ingredients were there. Mortal Kombat ’21 is exactly what Mortal Kombat shouldn’t be – too serious by half and too absorbed in the mythology of this universe. The film mostly leaned on Josh Lawson’s Kano to provide the humor and camp absent everywhere else, but that only served to make Kano feel like the odd man out. It also tries to cram entirely too many characters into a conflict that really boils down to the family drama between Scorpion and Sub-Zero, leading to a great many MK icons feeling like underdeveloped hangers-on.
And don’t even get us started on Lewis Tan’s Cole Young, the central protagonist of this grim little conflict. As an original creation for the film, Cole is meant to be the stand-in for the audience – the outsider suddenly thrust into a world of deadly martial arts duels and conflicts between realms. But Cole is also a character with zero charisma or depth. There was nothing to endear the character to the audience, and the whole movie suffered as a result.
Mortal Kombat ’21 is far from the worst video game movie ever released. It has its definite merits, particularly when it comes to the well-choreographed, hyper-violent fight scenes. And at least they kept the classic ’90s theme song. But it ultimately falls short of the bar established by the original film. It’s not as fun or campy as MK ’95, and it plays things a little too straight with the franchise and its mythology. Fortunately, that seems to be a mistake Warner Bros. aims to correct the second time around.
The Campy Appeal of Johnny Cage
It took five years, but Warners is finally releasing a sequel to the Mortal Kombat reboot in May 2026. Mortal Kombat II is again directed by Simon McQuoid, though this time the script is written by Jeremy Slater. Much of the cast from the original film are returning, such as Sanada’s Scorpion, Jessica McNamee’s Sonya Blade, Mehcad Brooks’ Jax, and Ludi Lin’s Liu Kang, but there are plenty of new additions to the mix as well, including Damon Herriman’s Quan Chi, Martyn Ford’s Shao Kahn, and CJ Bloomfield’s Baraka.
But easily the most significant newcomer this time around is Karl Urban’s Johnny Cage. As in the games, Cage is presented as a washed-up action movie star unwittingly dragged into the tournament between Earthrealm and Outworld. Urban has been the focal point of the film’s marketing so far, with Warners even going to the trouble of commissioning a short film that acts as a faux-teaser trailer for Cage’s magnum opus, Uncaged Fury. All signs seem to point to Cage being the main character in the sequel, supplanting Tan’s Cole Young this time around. Cole is reportedly still appearing in MK II, but you wouldn’t know it based on the trailers.
Right away, this looks to be an example of the sequel trying to make up for past mistakes. Cole clearly wasn’t working as a protagonist and audience stand-in, so McQuoid and Slater are pivoting to a character fans are much more intimately familiar with. Already, it’s obvious that Urban’s Cage has the charisma Cole himself was sorely lacking in the original movie. He’s a self-absorbed narcissist who wants nothing to do with the larger-than-life conflict unfolding around him, even though he may be just the right guy to save our dimension.
Or not. The new trailer shows Lin’s Liu Kang battling Ford’s Shao Kahn in what we assume is the climactic final battle, so the game may still be sticking to a more traditional version of the MK mythos in that regard. But regardless, Cage is being positioned as the audience stand-in this time, and we can’t imagine a better character for that role.
The trailers are crammed with Cage’s one-liners and snarky comments toward his fellow MK fighters. It really feels as though the sequel has developed a self-deprecating sense of humor that the previous film lacked. And that’s exactly what needed to happen. The sequel isn’t sticking to the overly grim tone of the first, but veering into the campier direction of the original 1995 film. And it’s all anchored by what is already shaping up to be one of Urban’s more memorable movie performances.
Nor is it just Cage himself who seems responsible for this shift in approach. In general, the trailers are more stuffed with the familiar MK elements fans know and love. There are more iconic catchphrases and special moves from the games. Nearly every action shot in the trailer hearkens back to the games in some way, whether it’s Liu Kang summoning a Fire Dragon against Shao Kahn or Kitana performing her deadly Fan Lift. Mortal Kombat II shows every sign of leaning into the sillier trappings of the games in a way the 2021 film never fully committed to. And in the process, it’s telling a much more complete and cohesive story about the conflict between realms. It doesn’t come across as a sequel so much as the first proper film in this series, making the 2021 original more of a prologue.
This all seems to be a very intentional shift on the part of the filmmakers. Back in a 2022 interview with The Direct, Slater revealed that the new screenplay is a result of lessons learned from the 2021 movie.
“I can’t say anything about the actual story, but I think they definitely learned some lessons the last time around in terms of, ‘Here’s the stuff fans responded to, and here’s what people liked out of the movie, and here’s the stuff that didn’t work out as well as we hoped.’ So we’re really looking at this as a chance to take everything that worked in the first one and do it even better and give the audience even more, and make something that is just incredibly satisfying, and really exciting, and unpredictable.”
Slater added that the sequel is definitely veering in a different tonal direction, one that embraces the more outlandish qualities of the MK games.
“I don’t think it’s necessarily going to have the same tone as the MCU, but it’s definitely going to have some of my sensibilities. That was part of my pitch to them. This is Mortal Kombat. We have guys who are ripping off their faces and breathing fire—it’s a weird universe, let’s embrace some of that weirdness, and let’s make a Mortal Kombat sequel that no one is expecting and that can kind of sneak in and blow everyone away.”
The jury is still out until the sequel actually lands in theaters, but between Slater’s comments and what we’re seeing of the Johnny Cage-heavy trailers, it really looks as though the Mortal Kombat franchise is getting back on the right track on the big screen. With any luck, we may soon have a new contender for the best live-action video game movie. It’s about time.
But let us know your thoughts on Mortal Kombat II. Do you think it’s shaping up to be an improvement over the original? Is Johnny Cage exactly what this series needed? Sound off in the comments.
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Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on BlueSky.