Street Fighter Trailer Reveals A Refreshingly Loyal Adaptation

We’ve come a long, long way from the days of fighting games being an experience reserved for two people dueling over an arcade cabinet. The genre has exploded in popularity: long-running franchises like Mortal Kombat and Tekken are still going strong, while newcomers like the upcoming Avatar: The Last Airbender game and Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls are highly anticipated. It’s a massive, varied, and lucrative niche within the gaming industry, and it’s hard to overstate just how different things would be without the impact of 1991’s Street Fighter 2, which almost single-handedly popularized the entire genre.

But for as influential and celebrated as Street Fighter is, the franchise has had atrocious luck at bringing its pulpy, cartoonish world to the big screen. 1994’s Street Fighter and 2009’s The Legend of Chun-Li were both panned by critics and rejected by the vast majority of fans. Now, Legendary Pictures, Capcom, and Paramount are making a third attempt, and while it would be easy to assume this one will stink as well, the first official trailer for Street Fighter looks far more promising (and faithful) than anyone could have predicted.

Unlike the short teaser shown off at this year’s Game Awards, the official trailer released today is nearly three minutes long and provides a significant look at both the fighters and the plot of the movie. Although we get glimpses of Roman Reigns as Akuma, Mel Jarnson as Cammy, and Orville Peck’s Vega, among many others, the trailer focuses on Noah Centineo’s Ken Masters, a former fighting champion who’s now a washed-up celebrity burnout.

While busy feeling sorry for himself, he’s approached by Chun-Li (Callina Liang) to compete in the 1993 World Warrior Tournament (surprisingly, the film is a period piece), only to discover that she’s recruited his estranged best friend and competitive rival Ryu (Andrew Koji) as well. Not only do the two of them have to mend an emotional rift, but they’ll have to team up with Chun-Li to take on a whole roster of highly-skilled fighters to get at the villainous M. Bison (David Dastmalchian), an evil mastermind using the tournament as a front for a grand criminal conspiracy. There’s also a lot of bone-crunching martial arts on display: axe kicks, a Shoryuken uppercut, and of course, a hadouken at the end of the trailer.

Unlike previous live-action Street Fighter films, this one looks acutely in touch with the aesthetic and tone of the games. Director Kitao Sakurai was the principal director on The Eric Andre Show (Andre himself shows up as Street Fighter 5’s Don Sauvage), and there’s a frenetic, larger-than-life energy that he carries over from that experience to the character designs, the camerawork, and the fight choreography itself. It’s also a genuinely clever decision to center the movie around the strained friendship between Ryu and Ken, as it builds off their long-standing in-game rivalry while adding a bit of emotional depth to a movie that could have easily just been a collection of action setpieces. Fans still have to wait a couple of months before the movie hits theaters, but just based on this trailer, the franchise might finally be in capable, loving hands.

Street Fighter hits theaters on October 16th, 2026.