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Before creating the original Mortal Kombat arcade game in 1992, Midway Games attempted to license Jean-Claude Van Damme’s image for a fighting game directly inspired by his film Bloodsport. When that deal collapsed, the design team repurposed that idea into a fictional Hollywood action star named Johnny Cage, whose original outfit, split-legged groin punch, and outsized ego all functioned as a deliberate parody of Van Damme’s screen persona. Cage would become one of the most recognizable characters in the Mortal Kombat franchise, which made his absence front he 2021 cinematic reboot a glaring omission. Mortal Kombat II writer Jeremy Slater is bringing Cage back to the silver screen with the sequel, and he reveals in an exclusive interview with that this version of the character is no longer based on Van Damme.
“I probably had a little bit of Cliff Booth,” Slater explained about how the Quentin Tarantino character inspired his Johnny Cage. “A little bit of Brad Pitt in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, just in terms of, like, fading star, guy who had a chance to sort of make it big, you know. I certainly wasn’t writing for Karl [Urban] specifically, because even at the time when they said, ‘Oh, we think we’re going out to Karl Urban,’ I was like, ‘That’s wild!’ I never would have thought of him for the role, but fortunately, Simon [McQuoid] saw that.”
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“Simon saw that this guy could go there, that he could find the sort of bruised heart at the core of Johnny Cage, beneath all the bluster and all the bravado,” Slater continued, praising Urban for his performance. “I probably incorporated a little bit of that Brad Pitt, relaxed, ‘This is all insane, but I’m just sort of gonna roll with it’ mentality that he brought to Cliff Booth. But I don’t think I wrote specifically for Brad Pitt or for any specific actor. It was much more just trying to get those Cliff Booth mannerisms a little bit, if that makes sense.”
Johnny Cage Is the Protagonist of the New Mortal Kombat Movie
The decision to center Mortal Kombat II on Johnny Cage is a course-correction to one of the reboot’s biggest flaws. When the 2021 reboot was in development, director Simon McQuoid deliberately excluded Cage from the story, reasoning that the character’s enormous personality would throw the narrative out of balance before the world had been properly established. To fill the protagonist role, screenwriter Greg Russo invented Cole Young (Lewis Tan), an original MMA fighter with no basis in the games. Despite Tan’s committed performance, Cole Young never achieved the traction the franchise needed.
Within the Mortal Kombat games, Cage has been a foundational presence since the original 1992 arcade release, where he was one of just seven playable fighters and, notably, the very first character designed by the development team. Across more than a dozen mainline entries, the character evolved from a simple Van Damme parody into a man whose comic self-absorption gradually became genuine heroism. His previous live-action appearances — Linden Ashby’s version in Paul W.S. Anderson’s 1995 cult classic and Chris Conrad’s in the critically maligned 1997 sequel Mortal Kombat: Annihilation — never fully captured that emotional range, reducing him largely to wisecracks. Urban’s version, built on the Cliff Booth framework Slater described, has the potential to be the most complex iteration of the character outside games.
Mortal Kombat II hits theaters on May 8th.
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