The Mortal Kombat reboot film has officially found its Sonya Blade and Kano in the form of The Meg‘s Jessica McNamee and Superstore‘s Josh Lawson, respectively. Casting seems to be nearing completion as a number of folks have previously been announced, including Power Rangers‘ Ludi Lin as Liu Kang and Warrior star Joe Taslim as Sub-Zero among others.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, McNamee is specifically “in final negotiations” while Lawson’s deal is done. Additionally, they report that Lewis Tan of Into the Badlands and Wu Assassins is also in final negotiations for a lead character, though it’s unclear who he might play given that Liu Kang’s already been announced. Is Tan up for Kung Lao? Or, if the producers really want to thrill fans, could he be the reboot’s Johnny Cage?
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Interestingly, this casting might signal the majority of the characters that will appear in the film, given that Greg Russo, the reboot’s writer, previously told ComicBook.com that juggling so many characters was a problem from the earlier films they weren’t interested in repeating.
“One of the trickiest things I think with adapting the properties are there are so many characters,” Russo said. “I mean there are, I think there’s 70 something characters in this and we don’t have the ability to stagger these films like the MCU does, right? We can’t do a Sonya movie and then do a Liu Kang movie. So we’re forced right into Avengers mode off the bat. So when that happens from a story perspective, you’re naturally going to have to juggle a lot of different characters and you’ll realize very soon that you only have so much room in, what’s hopefully, story one. I mean we only, our mantra as the team behind this movie is always kind of, movie one first, you know, let’s just make that great. Let’s not think about anything else.”
“I think a lesson we learned from Annihilation,” he continued, “is the more you try to cram into a movie, the more characters you try to cram in, I think they end up just getting lost and they feel like they’re just thrown in for no reason. And that was something that we really wanted to avoid.”
What do you think of the new casting reveals? Is Lewis Tan up for Kung Lao or someone else entirely? Johnny Cage, maybe? Let us know in the comments, or hit me up directly on Twitter at @rollinbishop to talk all things gaming!
The Mortal Kombat reboot film is currently scheduled to release on March 5, 2021. You can check out all of our previous coverage of the film right here.
