❌

Normal view

Received before yesterday

Karl Urban is a wise-cracking Johnny Cage in Mortal Kombat II

17 July 2025 at 20:06

Karl Urban takes a break from The Boys to play a washed-up Johnny Cage in the trailer for Mortal Kombat II, a sequel to 2021's Mortal Kombat reboot and the fourth live-action film in the franchise based on the 1990s video game series. It comes one day after Warner Bros. released a (very entertaining) fake trailer for a new in-universe, faux 1990s Johnny Cage movie, Uncaged Fury. (Cage's prior fake film credits apparently include Cool Hand Cage, Hard to Cage, and Rebel Without a Cage.)

The first live-action Mortal Kombat film turns 30 this year. It was a box office success but a critical failure, although it has since evolved into a campy cult classicβ€”and Cary Hiroyuki Tagawa is still considered by many to be the definitive portrayal of sorcerer Shang Tsung. Β A 1997 sequel, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, however, bombed both critically and financially. And Midway, the game publisher, filed for bankruptcy soon after.

However, Warner Bros. bought the rights and eventually tapped Simon McQuoid to direct a reboot more than 20 years after the original's release, focusing on MMA fighter Cole Young (Lewis Tan). The 2021 film earned mixed reviews, but performed sufficiently well at the box office for Warner Bros. to green-light a sequel, also directed by McQuoid. The 2021 film ended with Cole heading to Los Angeles to look for martial arts movie star Johnny Cage, who is the main protagonist of Mortal Kombat II.

Read full article

Comments

Β© YouTube/Warner Bros.

Ars reflects on Apollo 13 turning 30

29 June 2025 at 14:05

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the 1995 Oscar-winning film, Apollo 13, director Ron Howard's masterful love letter to NASA's Apollo program in general and the eponymous space mission in particular. So we're taking the opportunity to revisit this riveting homage to American science, ingenuity, and daring.

(Spoilers below.)

Apollo 13 is a fictional retelling of the aborted 1970 lunar mission that became a "successful failure" for NASA because all three astronauts made it back to Earth alive against some pretty steep odds. The film opens with astronaut Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks) hosting a watch party in July 1969 for Neil Armstrong's historic first walk on the Moon. He is slated to command the Apollo 14 mission, and is ecstatic when he and his crewβ€”Ken Mattingly (Gary Sinise) and Fred Haise (Bill Paxton)β€”are bumped to Apollo 13 instead. His wife, Marilyn (Kathleen Quinlan) is more superstitious and hence less thrilled: "It had to be 13." To which her pragmatic husband replies, "It comes after 12."

Read full article

Comments

Β© Universal Pictures

❌