The Kombat Gets Real: Karl Urban Joins Mortal Kombat II Roster

Karl Urban, most recently of The Boys and Star Trek fame, is trading in his leather coat from his role as Homelander for the shades of iconic Mortal Kombat character Johnny Cage in the sequel, Mortal Kombat II. The anticipated follow-up to the 2021 reboot, which teased at a sequel in its end credits, will mark the fourth live-action film based on the property since the original came out in 1995.

Warner Bros. has made a running gag out of spoofing the character, releasing a fake trailer for an intentionally bad parody movie called Uncaged Fury alongside the official trailer for Mortal Kombat II on Wednesday. Loosely riffing on the action flicks of the ‘80s and ‘90s, the fake Uncaged Fury trailer was laden with Cage-related in-jokes and poke fun at his fake movie credits with titles like Cool Hand Cage, Punchline, Black Jesus Cage, and Rebel Without a Cage.

The film also coincides with the 30th anniversary of the original Mortal Kombat movie, which flopped with critics but would grow to massive cult status. The highly-derided 1997 sequel Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, was made after the game publisher Midway Games went bankrupt the same year. Warner Bros. revived the film franchise with 2021’s Mortal Kombat, directed by Simon McQuoid and starring Lewis Tan as Cole Young, an MMA fighter who gets yanked into an ancient war to protect Earthrealm. The film ends with Young tracking down Cage and setting up the sequel.

The Return of the Champions and New Faces on the Roster

The new film picks up directly from the first, as Earthrealm’s newly minted champions — Cage included — must defend against another onslaught of villains. This time around, a new batch of killers fronted by evil emperor Shao Kahn descend on Earthrealm to reclaim its realm for his dying, malevolent dimension Outworld. Returning to the cast are Lewis Tan (Cole Young), Jessica McNamee (Sonya Blade), Joe Taslim (Bi-Han/Noob Saibot), and Hiroyuki Sanada (Scorpion) who are joined by new additions including Martyn Ford as Shao Kahn, Adeline Rudolph as Kitana, and Karl Urban as Johnny Cage.

The trailer serves as the first introduction to Urban’s version of Cage. In it, he is approached in a dingy bar by a guy pitching Cage an idea for rebooting his fictional movie Citizen Cage. Urban’s reaction to the request is a dry, exaggerated, “Nobody wants that.” The humorously jaded Johnny Cage continues when he is joined by Sonya Blade and Raiden, who he at first mocks as a “superfan” trolling him over the “tournament to the death” that he was apparently supposed to show up for as a champion of Earthrealm. After they explain that it is, in fact, a real thing, his immediate response is a straight-faced, “F— that.”

The trailer also points out Cage’s biggest weakness: a lack of special abilities or any real fighting power, with Urban deadpanning, “I’m just incredibly handsome” before begrudgingly accepting that he’ll have to fight anyway. He also has one rule, which is “No touching the face.” The rest of the trailer is, of course, full of expectations for the franchise. Violent, over-the-top fights, gruesome fatalities, and bombastic one-liners (like Scorpion’s “Get over here!”) abound.

Mortal Kombat II will be released in theaters on October 24, 2025.