The Street Fighter Movie Trailer Embraces the Source Material and It Shows
Legendary and Capcom dropped the first full trailer for Street Fighter on April 16th, and it is genuinely the one. The kind of video game movie that doesn’t apologize for what it is.
Andrew Koji plays Ryu, Noah Centineo plays Ken Masters, and the two are very much working through their issues when Callina Liang‘s Chun-Li shows up to recruit them for the World Warrior Tournament. Standard Street Fighter plot. Except it actually looks like Street Fighter this time.
I want Mortal Kombat to work, and I want that tone to be different than ours and for those two tones to coexist in the world, because that’s what the games did,”Sakurai said at CinemaCon.
Centineo‘s Ken smashes up a car in what reads as a straight lift from the Street Fighter II bonus stage. Ryu throws a Hadoken. Chun-Li breaks out the Spinning Bird Kick. Guile, apparently, has never seen a fireball before. The trailer runs nearly three minutes and earns most of them.
The full cast is, to put it charitably, unhinged. Jason Momoa as Blanka, David Dastmalchian (The Dark Knight) as M. Bison, Cody Rhodes as Guile, Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson as Balrog, Orville Peck as Vega, and Eric André as someone named Don Sauvage. Don Sauvage. Sure.
The whole thing is set to “What’s Up?” by 4 Non Blondes, which is either the most inspired trailer music choice in years or deeply cursed. Possibly both.
Director Kitao Sakurai wrote the screenplay alongside T.J. Fixman, with the story credited to Dalan Musson and Gary Dauberman. Sakurai coming off The Eric Andre Show and Bad Trip to helm a major fighting game movie is the kind of swing that either goes very right or very wrong. Based on this trailer, it looks like it’s going right. According to The Hollywood Reporter, this is also the first release from Paramount’s new distribution deal with Legendary.
Street Fighter hits theaters on October 16, 2026. We’ll keep you posted on updates about Street Fighter as the project develops.
Lewis Calvert Founder & Editor, BriefLedger
Lewis founded BriefLedger and has six years of experience covering film, TV, and entertainment news. He leads the site’s Movies and TV sections and runs the news desk — always with a straight-talking British take.
