Mortal Kombat 2 director teases the return of characters that were killed in the first movie: “There are ways to bring dead characters back”

As the first look at Karl Urban’s Johnny Cage in Mortal Kombat 2 just dropped, we also got another big update about the upcoming sequel. The confirmed cast includes two returning stars, Josh Lawson and Max Huang, even though their characters, Kano and Kung Lao, were killed in the 2021 movie.

Ed Boon, Mortal Kombat co-creator and head of gaming developer NetherRealm Studios, teased the surprising return of these characters during an interview with Entertainment Weekly, and offered a mysterious explanation.

“I can say Josh Lawson doesn’t play Kano’s twin,” Boon clarified, while pointing at the Mortal Kombat lore from the video games to argue how this storyline could make sense in the story. “We’ve killed a number of characters who are in Mortal Kombat 1 and our latest games. So we deal with spirits and the NetherRealm and things like that. There are ways to bring dead characters back,” he added.

Along with Lawson’s Kano and Huang’s Lao, Mortal Kombat 2 features the return of Lewis Tan’s Cole Young, Hiroyuki Sanada’s Scorpion, and Jessica McNamee’s Sonya Blade, with Jade (Tati Gabrielle), Queen Sindel (Ana Thu Nguyen), and Quan Chi (Damon Herriman) joining the cast for the first time.

The team behind the ultra-violent sequel worked to “maximize everything”, to “just build on where we were and then make it significantly more intense, bigger in scale, bigger in variation, bigger across the board really as a cinematic experience,” director Simon McQuoid told EW.

“We go to lots of different realms, so that in itself gives the film a very distinct and varied visual approach,” McQuoid continued, adding about the vision of the upcoming film: “What I realized was go bigger, go bolder, don’t hold back, and really feed off the history of Mortal Kombat more. Just let it rip, and that’s what we’ve done.”

Mortal Kombat 2 is set to be released in cinemas on October 24, 2025. For more, check out the other upcoming video game movies coming your way very soon.