The latestMortal Kombatmovie has a lot of people very excited for a modern film inspired by the ultraviolent fighting game series.Mortal Kombatis a franchise with a lot of iconic characters, and everyone has their favorite, so it was a disappointment to many fans when it was discovered that Johnny Cage, a goofball actor with surprising martial arts skills, would not be appearing in the film.
As a reboot of the live-actionMortal Kombatfilms, a lot of fans were expecting a return to the same basic plot of those stories, which makesJohnny Cage’s absencea notable omission. According to the producer for the reboot, however, there are a few good reasons to hold off on having the character show up in the first outing.
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Part of that reasoning is that this particularMortal Kombatfilm is trying to lean harder into the diverse nature of the character’s backstories and wanted a more authentic depiction that focuses on that interesting cultural subtext.Characters like Scorpion and Raidenare canonically Japanese, with Raiden, in particular, based on the Japanese god of thunder Raijin. This is something that producer Todd Garner, who discussedMortal Kombatduring a recent press event, wants to be baked into the film itself: “[The movie] has a very Asian feel to it. And I early on felt uncomfortable having a white male lead kind of lead that charge in the first movie.”
That doesn’t mean thatJohnny Cage isn’t going to show up eventuallythough. As the producer goes on to clarify, the biggest reason Cage won’t be seen in the first is because he just needs more room to breathe: “As the lead felt a little disingenuous to me and super easy to bring him in, in a big bombastic fun way in the second.” Garner went on to say that he wants to have Cage feature heavily in a theoreticalMortal Kombatsequel, and he thinks that it would make a great selling point when trying to get it greenlit: “I want to make a sequel, and I’ve now got Johnny Cage, which hasn’t been used in the first one.”
It’s a reasonable decision, but also a very clever one: hold back a fan-favorite character in order to increase interest in a theoretical sequel. There will easily be more than enough to work with given thealready-extensive cast characters inMortal Kombat, and fans should be happy with having some iconic characters throw down, even if not everybody gets a spotlight in the first outing.
The newMortal Kombatfilm comes out sooner than some may realize: April 2021. So, it’s quite likely that whatever happens in the film is more or less set in stone at this point. Still, hopefully, the film will be afun time forMortal Kombatfans and newcomersalike, and that paves the way for Johnny Cage to make a big debut in the sequel.
