Photo : Amy Sussman ( Getty Images )

James Wan is producing a new Mortal Kombat movie from director Simon McQuoid, with The Raid’s Jon Taslim playing Sub-Zero, Power Rangers’ Ludi Lin playing Liu Kang, Thor: Ragnarok’s Tadanobu Asano playing Raiden, and Supergirl’s Mehcad Brooks playing Jax. The Hollywood Reporter has a Hollywood report on some other actors joining the cast, including Jessica McNamee playing Sonya Blade and Josh Lawson playing Kano, but we have an issue: According to THR, Deadpool 2's Lewis Tan (he played Shatterstar before getting chopped up) has been cast as an “undisclosed lead character,” and we’re not entirely sure what that means.


The Mortal Kombat saga has a definitive list of characters that has been occasionally trimmed and expanded over the course of 11 c anonical video games. You can’t just have a lead character and not say who it is, because there’s already a lead character and his name is Liu Kang. Or Sonya Blade. Or Jax. Basically, most of the people who have already been cast. That just leaves the people who haven’t been cast, like Johnny Cage or Scorpion, so either Lewis Tan is playing Johnny Cage or Scorpion (or Kung Lao, or one of the other longtime Kombatants), or he’s playing some new character—which would be ridiculous. Nobody wants to see some new character in a Mortal Kombat movie, which means he has to be playing Johnny Cage or Scorpion, which means it’s silly to say he’s an “undisclosed lead character” when they should just say which character he’s playing.

It’s dumb, and we expect more from the movie about punching people’s skeletons out of their butts.