Andrew Bowen, the voice actor of one of Mortal Kombat‘s most known characters, Johnny Cage, recently posted a Twitter video that created a small blaze around the internet. As seen below, Bowen shot a selfie video in which he recorded the iconic Warner Brothers water tower, then brought the camera onto himself and raised his eyebrows. What’s even more pertinent is that the background music for the video sounded eerily similar to Mortal Kombat II’s soundtrack, and there was a voice line in the video that literally said the word “combat.” The tweet has since been deleted, which kind of speaks for itself.
Once the tweet began making the rounds, many noted the obvious implication that Bowen was getting ready to record voice-work for the next Mortal Kombat game; MK12. WBIE, or Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment, is after all the owner of the Mortal Kombat IP, and the publisher of their most recent iterations. And what corroborates this further, is the previously circulated idea that NetherRealm Studios, the development team behind Mortal Kombat, is likely working on the series’ next iteration, instead of making an Injustice game, as they’d been known to do before. This is because WB has long been reported to have been looking to sell some of its studios and/or IPs, most recently pointed out by journalist Imran Khan on Twitter. If they decided to sell NetherRealm, they could easily sell the Mortal Kombat IP with it, however, an IP like Injustice might be annoyingly tied up by licensing deals made with DC Comics.
Now, nothing is for sure. We don’t definitively know why Bowen was at the Warner Brothers studio. This is actually not the first time Bowen posted a video of himself near that Warner Brothers studio. He posted another video on April 29th, 2022, and this video you see below, on September 21st, 2021. The only difference with the most recent video, which perked up people’s ears, is the Mortal Kombat music.
It’s not unreasonable to assume that all these similarly-formatted videos tell the same story, and if such is the case, this could potentially mean Bowen has been recording voice lines for Mortal Kombat since September 2021. Such a large amount of time between these videos would mean the voice work is likely very close to being done. And that would in turn mean the game itself is well underway as well. Now, voice work is only one part of the very complicated process that is game development, but usually, for a gameplay-heavy experience like a fighting game, its functionality is ironed out first, with the mid-game voice lines being tacked on later.
A potential 2023 release date would match the series’ prior release cycle, as it would come out 4 years after MK11, which in turn came out 4 years after Mortal Kombat X. Of course, we don’t know exactly why Bowen was at the studio, and likely won’t for a while. His deleting of the tweet could be telling, however.
