Karl Urban’s Johnny Cage Is Mortal Kombat’s New MVP

Karl Urban has been swapping coats with Logan ever again, and apparently, Johnny Cage doesn’t have to worry about closet space with a leather trench like The Boys’ going away.

Urban, who is taking a break from his shield-swinging hulk-meets-superhero role in the next Thor, plays Cage in Mortal Kombat II, the sequel to the 2021 reboot, which has been coming ever since a post-credits clip at the end of the original teased the film.

The movie is the fourth live-action Mortal Kombat film since the original debuted in 1995, but as part of the same day Warner Bros. dropped the official trailer, the studio also unleashed the entirely fake trailer for a faux Kung Fury-esque movie called Uncaged Fury, an ’80s- and ’90s-style action movie parody also from the “screenwriter” Colby Sullivan, who has become a sort of in-house SNL Weekend Update-version-at-Warner Bros.

Uncaged Fury takes aim at Cage’s fictional filmography with obvious titles based on his characters’ names, like Cool Hand Cage, Chicken With No Soul, Get Short Cage, and Rebel Without a Cage. The fake trailer also revealed that for someone who spends his life being judged by fans for his lack of acting prowess and dying, Cage is apparently expected to show up to the real Mortal Kombat sequel.

The Mortal Kombat reboot is dropping to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the first film, which critics were mostly unkind to on its release, but has since accrued a massive cult following. The movie was followed by a 1997 sequel, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, after which the game publisher Midway Games would declare bankruptcy the same year. In 2021, Warner Bros. rebooted the series with director Simon McQuoid and his ensemble, which centered on Lewis Tan as Cole Young, an MMA fighter who discovers that he’s the key to Earthrealm’s war to save their world. The film ends with Young hunting down Johnny Cage.

Returnees

The new movie, according to its synopsis, will have the first-ever Mortal Kombat tournament’s champions, now including Cage, squaring off against a new set of villains, including Shao Kahn (Martyn Ford), who is now running amok as Earthrealm’s ruler with his conniving wife and queen (Adeline Rudolph) in Kitana (Krystana E. DiCortese). Lewis Tan (Cole Young), Jessica McNamee (Sonya Blade), Joe Taslim (Bi-Han/Noob Saibot), and Hiroyuki Sanada (Scorpion) are all expected to return.

Premiering during the film is Urban as Cage, but even though the iconic actor was a bigger action and sci-fi staple for years, he is known for a lot of franchises, like turning up as Blade in the Blade trilogy with Stephen King and usually a sense of world-weary dry humor. The character from the video game will obviously have more of that.

In the trailer, the most Cage we get at the moment is when he’s shown at a dive bar by himself. It’s at this point when one of his would-be fans approaches him and Cage about the reboot of Citizen Cage.

His response, “Nobody wants that,” is an authentic sample of his no-nonsense snark. He also plays against the savior the group is there to ask, which is made up of Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee) and Raiden (Max Huang). He takes their idea of being at the “tournament to the death” as a “superfan” sort of mission, as if they’ve been taken over by one of the other combatants and even as they threaten him, he’s at first skeptical until he sees they are dead serious. Cue Cage’s expletive-ridden response of “F— that.”

He even has his demands. Cage lets them know that he’s there, but only one rule applies. “No touching the face.”

What we then have is the trademark of every fan who has been anxiously awaiting the next stage of the blockbuster video game franchise, the corny one-liners and Mortal Kombat’s oversaturation of brutality and fatalities, which in the clip, includes one over Scorpion, who we first hear huff out, “Get over here!”

Mortal Kombat II opens on October 24, 2025.