Bad news for fans of fatalities, yelling “Get over here!” and watching Karl Urban act like a giant dick: This October’s Mortal Kombat II is no longer “this October’s” anything, because the film has now been delayed until May 15, 2026.
The film’s fans have, per Deadline, become victims of their enthusiasm here: The red-band trailer for the sequel was so popular, picking up a reported 100 million global views in the span of a month, that New Line and Warner Bros. decided they didn’t want to waste the movie on what’s expected to be a fairly dismal October. Instead, we’re in full-on summer blockbuster territory—good news for the movie itself, probably, but the upshot is that you’re going to have to wait another seven months to get more of Urban playing B-tier talent, A-tier ego Johnny Cage as he gets sucked into a cosmic battle with people who’ve never even seen his old movies. Alas!
Directed by Simon McQuoid, Mortal Kombat II is a direct sequel to his 2021 reboot of the video game-based film franchise, in which warriors from Earthrealm are tasked with lethally punching the forces of other dimensions in a big tournament that sometimes, inexplicably, involves someone yelling “Toasty!’ after landing a big hit. Urban is, obviously, the big addition to the sequel package: Someone pretty clearly got the memo that the first Mortal Kombat was pushing Josh “Kano” Lawson to his limits as the only guy who realized a Mortal Kombat movie should be goofy and fun, and tapped the Star Trek vet to put some more punctures in the films’ aura of self-seriousness. Whether it’ll be enough to repair the pretty obvious deficits of the first installment of the new franchise remains to be seen—now, for way longer than we’d initially thought.
