Days after Mortal Kombat producer Todd Garner confirmed principal photography had started on the film’s sequel, the filmmaker shared the first look at the film’s cast. Saturday morning, Garner shared a photo of the group at a restaurant during a break in filming. In the photo are several returning players including Ludi Lin (Liu. Kang), Mehcad Brooks (Jax Briggs), and Jessica McNamee (Sonya Blade).
Videos by ComicBook.com
The photo confirms the casting of Karl Urban as beloved Mortal Kombat fighter Johnny Cage while other newcomers like Tati Gabrielle (Jade) and Ana Thu Ngyen (Queen Sindel) can also be seen in the photo.
While the first Mortal Kombat was already plenty bloody enough, Mortal Kombat 2 writer Jeremy Slater previously told us the sequel would up the ante when it came to fatalities.
“I feel like the gore in Mortal Kombat is awesome and it’s part of what people come for, you always have to find that balance between fun gore and gross gore, right?” Slater said. “Because there’s times where you rip someone’s heart off or the best kill in the first movie is Kung Lao’s spinning hat just sort of slicing her in half and that’s the perfect example of fun gore because it’s disgusting, but everyone laughs at the same time, right? You want to make sure that everyone is sort of laughing at the sort of audacity of the gore and they’re not sitting there sort of sickened by close ups of dripping entrails and visceral and things like that. There’s a tongue in cheek aspect of Mortal Kombat in terms of the violence and in terms of the gore, there’s a little bit of winking at the audience and saying like, “Yeah, we know this is ridiculous, but it’s really fun and we’re all in on the joke together.” And when you find the right balance, I think that’s where you get moments like that incredibly bloody first battle that opens the first movie with score with Hanzo sort of tearing through all the assassins or you get the hat gag or things like that. So we’re looking at how do we emulate those gore moments from the first one that were really, really successful and got huge audience reactions and how do we give the audience even more this time around.”
Mortal Kombat 2 has yet to set a release date while the first film in the franchise can be seen streaming on Max.
