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Mortal Kombat II Director Reveals How They Made Johnny Cage's In-Universe Movie [Exclusive Interview]

By Bill Bria

May 8, 2026 1:00 pm EST

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Warner Bros. Pictures

In some cases, staging a fight sequence might be a moment when a movie director can take a back seat and let their stunt coordinator and second unit team do the heavy lifting. However, if you're making a movie entitled "Mortal Kombat II," based on the long-running series of hugely successful and influential video games, sleeping on the job is not an option. That's something Simon McQuoid learned while making 2021's "Mortal Kombat," which had its detractors but was generally praised for its inclusion of martial-arts legends in major roles and its inventive fight sequences. "Mortal Kombat II" ups the ante considerably, bringing in a wide variety of characters and environments that need to have a bit more dramatic weight to them than just icons on a game selection screen. Fortunately, McQuoid was up to the task, and I believe he made this sequel the best live-action "Mortal Kombat" adaptation yet.

The secret sauce in McQuoid's recipe this time around isn't anything technical, but instead emotional. With the film's new protagonists of Johnny Cage (Karl Urban) and Kitana (Adeline Rudolph), "Mortal Kombat II" gets a lot of creative juice from giving audiences some champions to root for during the titular tournament for the fate of Earthrealm. The drama is then deliciously compounded when McQuoid and writer Jeremy Slater have Cage and Kitana forced to fight each other. I asked McQuoid about the staging of that fight, its emotional stakes, and its physical execution. I also had to mention my love for the detail that he and the filmmakers put into Cage's character, portraying him as a washed-up former '90s action star. The fight scene we see in Cage's in-universe movie was made with tongue-in-cheek affection and authenticity, and McQuoid explained the latter aspect during our recent chat.

Note: This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity._

McQuoid talks balancing (and then flipping) his protagonists

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Warner Bros. Pictures

One of the things I was so impressed by is how earnest the movie is in terms of its respect of the games, and the lore, and the characters. I think that really comes through in that early fight scene between Kitana and Johnny, where you want both of them to win, you don't want either one to lose. What was it like for you staging a sequence like that in terms of keeping them sympathetically even, but having them actually have a fight?

Yeah, that was a really interesting and very important fight, that one, given how early it is and given how those two characters in the framework and the structure of the script and the story, they carry us through the film. They're the main pillars of the film, right? So it was important that they met each other early and then they plat together, and one causes an effect for the other, and they plat together at the end as we reach the ending. Also, we're seeing the fight through Johnny's eyes, and then we're also seeing it through Kitana's eyes. So we had to be aware of what was happening in both of their minds. First of all, Johnny, completely fish out of water, thrown in the deep end. So he's still trying to back out of it. He just has no idea what's going on. And that fight for him is about kind of re-sparking what's actually in here [points to his chest_], but he's lost contact with. So that's the first step of [his change], now he gets his ass kicked by Kitana.

But then with Kitana, she's playing the long game because she has this sort of pursuit and this goal to her revenge. And so she knows, well, she's not going to do what her father wants, or "her father" wants. She's going to do what she wants, but she has to make it look like... So there's a strategy there as well. So it was fun. It was amazing. So the giant flip that Zia [Kelly], who's the stunt performer for [Kitana], she did that about 20 times, that giant flip.

Wow.

Yeah, that's all in camera.

Oh, that's incredible.

Yeah. And she's such an amazing stunt performer. And Zia's actually the woman in the red dress with the rocket launcher [in the Johnny Cage movie]. So she's Kitana's stunt double. And it was a great, amazing fight to build and set up and watch happen.

Shooting on film was vital to creating the in-universe Johnny Cage movie

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Warner Bros. Pictures

You have that fight early on with Johnny in the fake movie, the Johnny Cage movie. What was it like to stage that where everything's kind of off, kind of wrong, but yet it's still obviously a movie?

Yeah, no, what we did is we took the idea and the principle that, how would they make [this]? We are making a film probably made in 1989 or 1990 or something. So we sort of worked that out. Then we got the lenses they would have shot with, and we shot it on film, and shot the whole thing, and sort of mirrored and copied the camera work, and just dialed the stunts a bit cheesier, right? So it was like, "Okay, let's just push that a little bit so that's not lost." And then certainly what Johnny's wearing, what Karl has to wear. And the sort of preposterous nature of what was going on in there, it was important to me that we did shoot it on film because it needed that layer and to be embedded into an authenticity that film would provide, and the film language we were shooting it with, and therefore it didn't stand out as a bad Halloween costume. It's sort of like, "Oh no, this feels legit," even though it's kind of cheese on purpose, right?

Absolutely.

That was a fun night we were shooting that. That was towards the end of the schedule, and by then, the whole cast and crew, everyone was getting on so well. And what's out of shot in those shots is there was like an office with a staircase that went up beside the office, and a large number of the other cast members were all standing on the staircase watching Karl do his thing and cheering at the end of every move. So that was a fun night.

"Mortal Kombat II" is in theaters everywhere._