IGN is excited to share with you the brand new trailer for Mortal Kombat II, which you can watch via the player embedded below. The trailer debuted during a live stream Thursday morning between IGN, Warner Bros. Pictures, and IMAX. Ahead of the trailer’s global online debut, I was able to chat exclusively with actor Karl Urban – who brings the iconic Johnny Cage to life in Mortal Kombat II – as well as director Simon McQuoid and producer Todd Garner in their first extensive interviews about the highly anticipated sequel.
The 2021 reboot of Mortal Kombat, also directed by McQuoid, was released simultaneously in theaters and on HBO Max during the COVID-19 pandemic, where it became the streamer’s most successful movie launch ever.
“When we made the [first] movie, Warner Bros. didn’t know how people were going to react. They didn’t know. We didn’t have a huge budget to do whatever we wanted to do,” Garner recalled. “We certainly couldn’t compete with the huge superhero movies by any stretch of the imagination, so we were limited by the scale and scope of that movie because they didn’t really know what they had.”
“The fact that the movie did so well on HBO Max, and obviously now that we have Mike De Luca at Warner Bros. and Pam Abdy, they really knew not only what they had from the numbers from HBO Max, but they also knew, Mike knew because he has such a fondness for the series. They gave us more scale, more scope to do the fights, more fighting, which is expensive quite frankly.” (De Luca, it should be noted, was a young executive at New Line Cinema in the 1990s where the original Mortal Kombat movies were produced.)
Watch the new red band Mortal Kombat II trailer:
“Most franchises don’t start with the prequel. Most franchises start with the movie and then you do the prequel, because we have a movie that sets up the rules and sets up the world. It doesn’t have a tournament, and now we wanted to make sure that we did the tournament and what people expect from the Mortal Kombat franchise,” Garner explained. “And so coming into the movie with Johnny Cage being new to the tournament, [it’s] not hard to follow.”
Director McQuoid said a very large percentage of the film was shot in IMAX, which allowed for the scale of not just the fight scenes but the world of Mortal Kombat itself to level up.
“We’ve got some new characters coming in and some of those new characters are wild and otherworldly, like Shao Kahn. And when you’ve got characters like that, you have to swing for the fences, really,” McQuoid said. “I wanted to use what Mortal Kombat had by going to new realms and giving it a bigger, more wild [feel], more scope, and use the material that’s just sitting there ready to be used. And so, in pushing into those new realms, and we go to Edenia and we spend a lot of time there, and that was exciting because it hasn’t really been portrayed all that much… It was great to bring massive scale to that. And also some of the levels from the game, we were able to take those things and scale them up to a big and beautiful place.”
The director added that “there’s some things in the IMAX version, some little story moments and little gems for the super fans that, if you see the IMAX version, you’ll see something in that version that you won’t see in the regular theatrical version. I just wanted to try and innovate and use the format in a way that really makes it a rewarding experience for the audience.”
With McQuoid back in the director’s chair and a script by Moon Knight’s Jeremy Slater, the next step was finding the right actor to play Johnny Cage, a fan favorite character from the games who was only teased at the end of the first film but is the main protagonist of the sequel.
“We didn’t know if the general audience would buy an arrogant actor as the lead of the first movie, or would it be strange that it would be this arrogant actor in this basically martial arts movie? Did it feel weird?,” Garner said.
“For people who didn’t know the game and didn’t know the franchise, would it just feel like, ‘Wait, you have these guys with these superpowers that are doing incredible martial arts and this arrogant actor from the nineties? What is this?” It just felt like it was all over the place. So Liu was used in the first movie as the sage, the teacher, the wise one, which he is, and we knew we had to ultimately get to Johnny Cage because he’s such a big presence in the franchise.”
Garner was candid about the challenges of casting Johnny Cage while also keeping fans happy. “I get it. Everybody comes to the franchise with their own love of it and their own feeling of what it should be,” the producer admits. “I’d have to make a hundred thousand different movies to please everybody.”
Garner specifically cites the factions of fans who lobbied for wrestler-actor The Miz, martial artist-actor Scott Adkins, or movie stars like Ryan Reynolds and Glen Powell. “Those two gentlemen have massive careers and schedules and they make untold lots and lots of money that probably wouldn’t have necessarily fit into our budget, let alone our schedule,” Garner said.
“What we tried to do with this movie in the casting from the get-go is not have celebrity casting of like, oh, it’s so-and-so playing Liu Kang. We wanted it to be Liu Kang, we wanted it to be Scorpion, we wanted it to be Sub-Zero, Jax, and so forth. So it wasn’t like we were going for the biggest star. We wanted to try to bring the best to the characters, and Karl, he’s an incredible actor. I’ll put him up against anybody, and for this journey of this movie, we needed somebody to embody Johnny Cage, and he did that.”
The Johnny Cage of Mortal Kombat II, however, is not quite the same blowhard typically depicted in the Mortal Kombat games or past film and TV adaptations. Not initially, anyway. “When we first discover Johnny, he is sort of lacking a lot of that quintessential spark that I think fans of the game will know,” Urban told IGN.
“We start him at a very low point. His career is completely in the dumps. He has no self-confidence. He has neglected his martial arts training. And at his lowest point, he gets called up to, essentially, be a warrior that represents the Earthrealm and fight for the very future of humanity. And as I read the script, I found it just such a compelling, interesting, dynamic journey. We start this character in one place, and as an audience, we get to see him evolve and grow.”
“A wonderful facet of the writing is they really humanize the character of Johnny and he’s not some [two-dimensional] character, not that he ever was, but he has room to grow. And he certainly does that as he gains his confidence and gains his belief in his self, [and] some of that sort of cockiness and swagger starts to come through.”
While Urban has long known of Mortal Kombat, he credits playing the game with his kids – and losing soundly to them – with making him fall in love with the franchise. “When Mortal Kombat first came out, and I think it was around ’92, I was so broke, I couldn’t even afford a PlayStation, let alone the game, so I sort of missed out on the initial wave in it,” the Star Trek and The Boys actor recalled.
“When I heard that they were doing a second installment of the film and that Johnny Cage was going to be a huge part of it, we were very proactive about seeking out the director and the producers and getting a hold of the script, which was fantastic,” said Urban. “Jeremy Slater wrote an amazing script. And yeah, I just couldn’t be more thrilled, not only to portray this version of Johnny Cage, but just to be a part of the Mortal Kombat world.”
To prepare for the role, Urban consumed everything he could about his iconic character and the Mortal Kombat franchise and he also underwent training that he described as “the most difficult fighting that I have ever done in my career.” But while the physical aspects were “a huge challenge,” Urban said his main objective as an actor was making Johnny Cage feel like a real person.
“For me, the challenge, really, was to ground the character in a reality and to give him a backstory. And my research, apart from absorbing everything I could about Mortal Kombat and what had been done with Johnny Cage previously and what had been done with him in the games, was to then really formulate a backstory,” Urban said.
“Part of my research is I went along to a bunch of karate tournaments and looked at young kids coming through and just absorbing myself in the culture and imagining young Johnny before he was plucked out of that into movie stardom, what that was like. And I found that just a really wonderful and fascinating experience and a real eye-opener.”
Urban assured me that “fans of Johnny Cage are going to be super delighted by the signature moves and all the nods and elements that we’ve worked so hard to infuse into the movie.” While Urban spoke of the reverence and fan service the filmmakers have put into Mortal Kombat II, he also acknowledged that “the objective is also to make it accessible to a new audience. We are making this film also, not only for fans of Mortal Kombat, but for fans of cinema and for fans of fun, action, adventure, martial art movies. And you don’t have to have even played Mortal Kombat or even seen the first film to jump straight into this.”
Urban then paid the film one of the highest compliments an action movie could receive: “I think Mortal Kombat II is to Mortal Kombat what The Road Warrior is to Mad Max. I think that everybody across the board has leveled up in a significant way right across the entire production. And I think this representation of this world and these characters is the best we’ve seen. And I’m super excited for an audience to see it. As you’ve seen from the trailer itself … it looks like a significant level-up.”
Mortal Kombat II opens in theaters October 24, 2025. Look for more from IGN’s exclusive interviews with the filmmakers soon.
