Mortal Kombat 12 Confirmed, Releasing In 2023

Mortal Kombat 12, long rumored but yet to be officially announced, has been confirmed in Warner Bros. Discovery’s fourth quarter 2022 earnings call. It’s set to release later this year.

David Zaslav, Warner Bros. Discovery’s president and CEO, announced the game in a segment of the call discussing the company’s games business. He stated that Mortal Kombat 12, along with Rocksteady’s Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, are both set to arrive later this year “with ambitious launch projections.”

Zaslav stated that Warner Bros. Discovery’s video game business was a key part of its strategy for the coming year and something that sets it apart from other competing media companies.

NetherRealm Studios, the developer behind Mortal Kombat, has yet to comment on the matter officially, but fans have long suspected that the next entry in the long-running fighting game franchise was around the corner. Despite it having been a number of years since NetherRealm’s previous game, Mortal Kombat co-creator and NetherRealm chief creative officer Ed Boon has repeatedly let fans down easy on social media ahead of major game announcement presentations, and in October 2022 said the announcement of the studio’s next project was “coming in due time.”

Some fans believe NetherRealm producer Jonathan Andersen intentionally leaked Mortal Kombat 12’s existence last year, when a since-deleted image of his work desk showed a file name on his monitor titled “MK12_Mast…” along with an email that read “Our fans eagerly scrape the internet.” The previous game in the series, Mortal Kombat 11, released in 2019 and has sold over 12 million copies as of July 2021. Mortal Kombat as a franchise celebrated its 30th anniversary last year.