Popverse's top stories

• Ultimate Universe architect Jonathan Hickman didn't expect Marvel Comics to close the line down
• Tron: Ares might end up costing Disney more money than it costs to make an entirely new movie after its dramatic flop
• IT: Welcome to Derry's Andy Muschietti & Brad Caleb Kane tease a Dark Tower connection - but not a Stephen King multiverse show

As I look toward 2026 as the year when video game movies remember to be fun, the film I’m most excited about is Mortal Kombat 2. Right now, all eyes are on Karl Urban as Johnny Cage to carry the franchise forward and make us believe in Mortal Kombat again. We still don’t know much about the story of Mortal Kombat 2, but after seeing an early fight scene with him, I think I know what Johnny Cage’s power is going to be, and it’s not what I expected, but, oddly, it works.

At New York Comic Con 2025, I was lucky enough to be in the room when they showed an early clip of Mortal Kombat 2. It was basically the initial fight between Johnny Cage and Baraka that was as silly and fun as you’d expect it to be, giving me hope that the rest of the movie will follow suit. One detail that I think got pseudo-revealed during that panel was the nature of Cage’s arcana power, which is basically just… movies.

For background, 2021’s Mortal Kombat introduced the idea that all those special moves that characters do during fights are a kind of superpower that exists in this world called arcana. Each one is different for each character, and they range from shooting fireballs or lasers to having metal arms. It is a goofy way to explain why humans are doing all these things, but it works for the universe they’ve set up. 

You might expect Johnny Cage’s arcana to be shooting fireballs or doing a cool shadow kick, but he doesn’t really do anything like that in the clip we were shown. In fact, he doesn’t do much fighting at all until it is as dramatic as possible. For the first half of the clip, he’s running away from Baraka, who is clearly stronger, tougher, and spikier than he is. At the start, everyone expects Cage to die horribly, even himself. “I’m not a fighter. I’m an actor,” he says.

After getting tossed through a roof and out into the middle of the village, Cage is seemingly beaten, but then things inexplicably turn. Sonya Blade gives him a rather unconvincing pep talk that is, and I’m not joking, just “You’re an actor. So act.” That is all it takes for Cage to get up, make a snappy one-liner, and proceed to wipe the floor with Baraka. Suddenly, he is doing flips and blocking blows that he’d been running away from. It all ends with a split nut-punch that could have come directly out of one of Cage’s movies.

And that’s the key here. It was exactly like the clip from Caged Fury, the in-universe movie that Johnny Cage stars in. We’ve seen the trailer for it. We know what that movie was like. I’m pretty sure that Cage is going to have the most powerful arcana of all the Earthrealm fighters – he’s going to be able to bend the rules of the universe to make it just like one of his dumb action movies.

To be clear, I think this is a brilliant idea. It is meta and fun and absolutely ridiculous, but if they play it out in the rest of the script, it could work really well as a tongue-in-cheek bit of humor that serves as a foil to the rest of the brutal action we see. If they are clever with it, this twist could serve as a wonderful commentary on the action film tropes that Mortal Kombat 2 is invariably going to lean into. We won’t know until May 2026 if they do this idea justice, but, for now, I’m here for the change.

Want to know what's coming up next in pop culture? Check out Popverse's guides to:

• Upcoming movies
• Upcoming TV shows
• Upcoming comics
• Upcoming games
• Upcoming fiction books
• Upcoming comic conventions