Like so many Hollywood productions this year, Mortal Kombat 2, which kicked off principal photography in June, was forced to stop filming due to the SAG-AFTRA strike. However, with this labor dispute now over, the sequel to the 2021 Mortal Kombat reboot has finally resumed rolling cameras. Karl Urban, who’s playing Johnny Cage, celebrated returning to set by sharing a cute Instagram post.
Fresh off his reprisal of Billy Butcher in the season finale of The Boys spinoff Gen V, Urban is back to working on Mortal Kombat 2 four months after he first started bringing Johnny Cage to life. Check out the below picture from Instagram of him reunited with his cast-mates:
Urban and costars Mehcad Brooks, Ludi Lin, Adeline Rudolph and C.J. Bloomfield posed for a photo to commemorate Mortal Kombat 2 resuming production. Roughly three weeks of filming had been carried out before the actors strike ground things to a halt, but now the cast and crew of this sequel are now together and can continue this portion of the filmmaking process uninterrupted… well, aside from taking off for Thanksgiving and Christmas. This also gives us another peek at Urban’s Johnny Cage look, with the first peek being shared by director Simon McQuoid in mid-July.
Karl Urban was the first new actor to be unveiled for Mortal Kombat 2, although we already knew Johnny Cage would appear in the sequel given Mortal Kombat’s ending tease. The Star Trek and Thor: Ragnarok alum will be the third actor to play the character in a major motion picture, following Linden Ashby in 1995’s Mortal Kombat and Chris Conrad in 1997’s Mortal Kombat: Annihilation. This will be his first movie since voicing Jacob Holland in The Sea Beast, which can be streamed with a Netflix subscription.
Shortly after Urban’s involvement was revealed, word came in that Mortal Kombat 2 cast Tati Gabrielle as Jade, and that was followed by Adeline Rudolph being selected to play Kitana. Other new faces appearing in the sequel include Martin Ford as Shao Kahn, Desmond Chiam as King Jerrod, Ana Thu Nguyen as Sindel, Damon Herriman as Quan Chi and C.J. Bloomfield as Baraka. Meanwhile, the returning cast includes Lewis Tan as Cole Young, Mehcad Brooks as Jax Briggs, Jessica McNamee as Sonya Blade, Ludi Lin as Liu Kang, and Tadanobu Asian as Raiden, among many others.
Behind the scenes, along with Simon McQuoid reprising his helming duties, Jeremy Slater of Moon Knight and The Umbrella Academy fame wrote the script. It hasn’t been announced yet when Mortal Kombat 2 will be released, but provide there aren’t any more hiccups with filming, I won’t be surprised if it’s slotted for the latter half of the 2024 movies calendar, if not sometime in 2025. Max subscribers can stream its predecessor now.
