Street Fighter Movie Trailer: A Radical, Over-the-Top Love Letter to '90s Gaming

The Game Awards 2024 delivered one of its most unexpected and entertaining moments when the cast of the upcoming Street Fighter movie took the stage—and they didn't disappoint. What followed was a high-octane first trailer that has fans buzzing about whether Hollywood has finally cracked the code on video game adaptations.

Forget everything you thought you knew about video game movies. This isn't your typical gritty reboot or overly serious reimagining. Instead, director's embrace of the franchise's inherent absurdity might just be the secret ingredient that's been missing all along.

A Star-Studded Roster That Reads Like a Fever Dream

The casting choices alone make this project fascinating. WWE Champion Cody Rhodes as Guile? Check. Jason Momoa as the feral, green-skinned Blanka? Absolutely. The ensemble reads like someone threw darts at a board of entertainers from wildly different backgrounds and somehow landed on gold.

The full roster includes Noah Centineo as Ken Masters, Andrew Koji as Ryu, Roman Reigns as the demonic Akuma, Callina Liang as Chun-Li, David Dastmalchian as the villainous M. Bison, comedian Andrew Schulz as Dan Hibiki, Vidyut Jammwal as Dhalsim, Eric André as Don Sauvage, country musician Orville Peck as the masked narcissist Vega, Olivier Richters as Zangief, Hirooki Goto as E. Honda, and Mel Jarnson as Cammy.

Notably absent from the stage presentation was Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson, who's reportedly playing Balrog, though no explanation was given for his absence during the reveal.

Embracing the Ridiculous: A Tonal Masterstroke

What immediately stands out in the trailer is the film's willingness to lean into its source material's inherent campiness. According to Polygon's coverage, the movie adopts a tongue-in-cheek humorous tone that acknowledges the absurdity of people shooting fireballs from their hands and a man who can stretch his limbs like rubber.

The best evidence of this approach? Cody Rhodes' Guile sports the character's impossibly gravity-defying flat-top haircut—and even executes his signature flash kick. Rather than trying to "ground" these elements in realism, the filmmakers appear to be celebrating them. It's big, bright, and unapologetically silly.

The 1993 Setting: Peak Street Fighter Nostalgia

Setting the film in 1993 is a stroke of genius. This places the story squarely in the era when Street Fighter II dominated arcades worldwide, having been released in 1991 and reaching peak cultural saturation by the mid-'90s. For fans who pumped quarters into those cabinets, this time period represents the franchise at its most iconic.

The color palette showcased in the trailer pays direct homage to the vibrant, almost neon aesthetic of the original arcade game. Anyone who remembers the bright blues of Chun-Li's qipao or the explosive yellow of Ryu's hadouken will recognize the visual DNA immediately.

Learning from Past Mistakes

This isn't Hollywood's first attempt at bringing Street Fighter to the big screen. The 1994 film starring Jean-Claude Van Damme as Guile remains notorious for all the wrong reasons, despite Raul Julia's memorable final performance as M. Bison. That film tried to shoehorn the game's characters into a more conventional action movie framework, losing much of what made the source material special.

There have been other attempts as well, including animated films and the Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li live-action feature from 2009, which was critically panned. Each previous iteration seemed to struggle with the same fundamental question: How do you take something as inherently outlandish as Street Fighter and make it work cinematically?

The answer, based on this trailer, appears to be: Stop fighting it. Embrace the chaos.

Wrestling With Expectations

The inclusion of two major WWE superstars—Cody Rhodes and Roman Reigns—is particularly intriguing. Professional wrestling has always shared DNA with fighting games: larger-than-life characters with signature moves, colorful personalities, and theatrical confrontations. These performers already understand how to embody characters who exist at a heightened level of reality.

Rhodes and Reigns bring name recognition and proven ability to commit fully to ridiculous premises with complete sincerity. If anyone can sell a flash kick or the Raging Demon technique, it's performers who regularly execute equally physics-defying moves in the ring.

A Playful Jab at the Competition

In a moment that delighted the Game Awards audience, the assembled Street Fighter cast called out the actors from the upcoming Mortal Kombat 2 for not being present at the show. This playful rivalry mirrors the decades-long friendly competition between the two fighting game franchises and shows the cast is already invested in the project's success.

It's the kind of meta-humor that suggests everyone involved understands exactly what kind of movie they're making and is having fun with it.

The Long Wait Ahead

With a release date set for October 16, 2026, fans have nearly two years to speculate, theorize, and debate casting choices. That's a lengthy runway, but it also suggests the production team isn't rushing this. Given the franchise's rocky history with film adaptations, taking the time to get it right seems like the prudent approach.

The October release date is interesting from a strategic standpoint as well. It positions the film outside the crowded summer blockbuster season but arrives in time to capitalize on Halloween season foot traffic and word-of-mouth heading into the holiday season.

What This Means for Video Game Movies

If Street Fighter succeeds by embracing rather than downplaying its video game origins, it could signal a shift in how Hollywood approaches these adaptations. Recent successes like The Super Mario Bros. Movie and Sonic the Hedgehog franchise have shown that audiences respond positively when filmmakers respect and celebrate their source material rather than trying to "fix" it.

The video game movie curse might finally be broken not through gritty reimaginings, but through joyful, sincere adaptations that understand why people loved these games in the first place.

Final Round

Based on this first trailer, the new Street Fighter movie appears to understand something its predecessors didn't: these characters and this world were never meant to be taken entirely seriously. They were meant to be spectacular, colorful, and fun.

With a cast that spans action stars, comedians, wrestlers, and musicians, a visual style that honors the games' arcade roots, and a tone that embraces the franchise's inherent absurdity, this could finally be the Street Fighter film that fans have been waiting for since that first quarter dropped into an arcade machine back in 1991.

Whether it sticks the landing remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: it won't be boring. And for a franchise built on the simple premise of "the world's greatest fighters enter a tournament," that might be exactly perfect.