Street Fighter Is in Theaters Today — and the Critics Cannot Agree on What It Even Is

By The News Desk, Previously

October 16, 2026

Street Fighter is in theaters today, and it arrives carrying the most honest reviews a video-game movie can get: nobody is pretending it is a well-built film, and a lot of critics had a great time anyway. The Legendary and Capcom production, distributed by Paramount and directed by Kitao Sakurai, opened Friday with early critics' scores in the high 30s on Rotten Tomatoes — ComingSoon counted 38 percent from 34 reviews on Thursday — alongside a wave of notices that praise its hand-drawn anime sequences and fight choreography while taking apart its story. This is the release-day peg for a film we have been tracking all month, from the release preview to the anime-flashback approach — and opening morning is when the only opinion that was ever going to matter, the audience's, starts to count.

The Film, and the Roster Problem

The basics first. Street Fighter runs 120 minutes and is rated PG-13. Sakurai directs from a screenplay credited to T.J. Fixman and Sakurai, with story by Dalan Musson and Gary Dauberman; Mary Parent, Cale Boyter, Jason Momoa, Takayuki Nakayama and Stefan Makhoul produce. The cast is the marketing: Noah Centineo, Andrew Koji and Callina Liang at the center, with Roman Reigns as Akuma, David Dastmalchian as M. Bison, Cody Rhodes as Guile, Jason Momoa as Blanka, Curtis '50 Cent' Jackson as Balrog, Vidyut Jammwal as Dhalsim, Orville Peck as Vega, Andrew Schulz as Dan, Eric André, Mel Jarnson as Cammy and Olivier Richters as Zangief, among others.

That roster is the film's promise and its structural problem, and the first reviews split precisely on it. Critics who enjoyed the film tend to credit the commitment of the ensemble and the sheer recognisability of the fighters; critics who did not argue that Ryu, Ken, Chun-Li and Dan compete for oxygen while a dozen other beloved characters get introductions instead of arcs, and that the story spends so long on subplots that the main conflict starts late. Bollywood Hungama's review, rating it 2 out of 5, landed in the second camp on the writing while praising the action, costumes, production design and several performances — a split that repeats across the review file with unusual consistency.

What Works: The Anime, the Fights, the Nerve

The element almost every review singles out for praise is the one readers of our earlier coverage will recognise: the hand-drawn 2D animated sequences, which critics responded to positively even inside otherwise negative notices, and which give the film a visual identity nothing else in the genre is using. Scott Mendelson's review went further, crediting the film's emphasis on form over function and its disregard for narrative coherence as almost refreshing — a maximalist, gleefully irreverent swing in a blockbuster landscape he described as visually timid. Leo Birenberg and Zach Robinson's score, particularly in the anime passages, and Ken Seng's cinematography also drew specific praise.

The fighting itself divides the room more than the trailers suggested it would. Some reviewers found the choreography physical and satisfying — the quality fans are actually buying a ticket for — while others found sequences cut away before they develop or felt underwhelming next to the game's own animation. ComingSoon's 6-out-of-10 verdict is the middle position in one sentence: a messy, frequently ridiculous popcorn movie that still delivers enough spectacle, colourful personalities and satisfying physical action to justify itself. Whether that reads as a warning or a recommendation depends entirely on what you wanted from a Street Fighter movie, which is rather the story of this opening weekend.

What Doesn't: A Tournament That Barely Happens, and That Ending

The sharpest specific criticism comes from Consequence, and it is about the premise itself. The film does include an eight-man fighting competition, bracket on the arena wall and all — but only two actual tournament fights are shown on screen, with one bout cut entirely and others resolved by forfeit, while action outside the tournament carries the runtime. For a franchise whose entire concept is a fighting tournament, the review argued, that feels like a tease, and it unfavourably compared the structure to this summer's Mortal Kombat II, which made its tournament the spine of the plot.

Then there is the ending, which became a story of its own before the film even opened. Multiple critics flagged a cliffhanger so openly engineered as sequel bait that one widely shared reaction called it egregious, and ComingSoon's coverage reported reviewers arguing the film should have been a one-and-done. The counter-argument is sitting in the same reviews: the gung-ho energy and the cast's commitment left even sceptical critics curious about a second film. A sequel-bait ending is only an insult if nobody wants the sequel, and opening weekend — not the critics' score — will settle which side of that line this film lands on.

The Opening-Weekend Question

Game adaptations live or die on the gap between critics and fans, and Street Fighter was built for the fan side of that gap: recognisable fighters in accurate costumes, signature moves staged for the people who have been throwing them since 1991, and an anime flourish aimed straight at the same audience. The fans-versus-critics split was visible in the first review coverage itself — one side buying a ticket for the roster and a good time, the other warning that clear motivations and a proper ending would not have hurt. Both, as more than one critic conceded, want the same fights to be good.

So the number to watch this weekend is not the Tomatometer; it is the audience score and the Saturday hold. If the crowd that grew up on this series walks out happy, a 38 percent critics' score becomes a trivia answer and the sequel the ending demands becomes a business decision. If they walk out agreeing with the harshest reviews, the cliffhanger becomes the story. Either way, the film James flagged as the headline of today's entertainment slate — our full slate is in today's streaming and premiere guide — has done the first job of an opening day: everybody is arguing about it.