Street Fighter Trailer Is Just Weirdos Battling Each Other, As It Should Be
In 1994, Universal released a movie about United Nations forces investigating a warlord who expanded his grasp by establishing a new country, complete with its own currency. For some reason, this movie was called Street Fighter, and was based on the video game series. The video game series is about choosing one to three characters, having them stand equidistant on opposite sides of the screen, and then mashing buttons to cause all sorts of spectacular nonsense until the opposing character(s) fall down.
If the latest trailer for the 2026 movie is any indication, the new movie will feel a lot more like the game and not so much like the previous film. Sure, the trailer manages to include bits about a warrior who has lost his way, a friend called back into battle, and the joys of singing 4 Non Blondes on karaoke night. But really, it’s just a bunch of colorful weirdos kicking and punching each other until a crunchy, digitized voice declares, “Perfect!”
This new Street Fighter comes from director Kitao Sakurai, who wrote the script with T.J. Fixman (from a story by Dalan Musson and Gary Dauberman). It stars Noah Centineo as Ken Masters and Andrew Koji as Ryu, two students at the same martial arts school who have long since gone their separate ways. The trailer shows that both have fallen on hard times, but seem to have found new inspiration to keep going, possibly by the arrival of Chun-Li (Callina Liang), but more likely by their participation in a fighting tournament held by the villainous M. Bison (David Dastmalchian).
Such thin plot threads would not be enough to make most movies watchable. But Street Fighter is not most movies, because it’s based on a simple game with outlandish visuals. Even though the fighting game genre owes a great debt to Bloodsport, the 1989 Jean-Claude Van Damme film about a guy in a secret fighting tournament, films based on those games have been loath to just film the tournament. Even the recent (and largely very good) Mortal Kombat film spent a lot of time building up to the fighting tournament instead of actually showing the thing.
