The new Street Fighter movie lands Friday, and it's set in 1993 on purpose

Three decades after Jean-Claude Van Damme played an American colonel with a Belgian accent, Street Fighter is getting another live-action shot. The new movie from Paramount and Legendary hits theaters this Friday, October 16.

The setup is aimed squarely at anyone who fed quarters into a Street Fighter II cabinet. The film is set in 1993, right when that game owned every arcade and pizza joint in America. Ryu and Ken, now estranged, get pulled into the World Warrior Tournament after Chun-Li recruits them, and a conspiracy forces the two old friends to settle some things. M. Bison is, naturally, involved.

The cast is genuinely ridiculous

This is a roster built like a character select screen:

• Andrew Koji as Ryu and Noah Centineo as Ken
• Callina Liang as Chun-Li
• David Dastmalchian as M. Bison
• Jason Momoa as Blanka
• Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson as Balrog
• Cody Rhodes as Guile and Roman Reigns as Akuma
• Vidyut Jammwal as Dhalsim, Olivier Richters as Zangief, Hirooki Goto as E. Honda
• Orville Peck as Vega and Andrew Schulz as Dan Hibiki

There are deep cuts too. Eric André plays Don Sauvage, a character who started life as a background figure on Balrog's stage in Super Street Fighter II. Mel Jarnson plays Cammy, and UFC fighter Alexander Volkanovski shows up as Joe.

Kitao Sakurai directs. You may know him from the prank comedy Bad Trip, which tells you something about the tone they're going for.

A bumpy road to Friday

This movie almost came out somewhere else. It was originally dated for March 2026 through Sony, but that slot evaporated after Legendary's distribution deal with Sony ended. Paramount picked up the rights in September 2025 and set the October date. It's the first release in a new Legendary-Paramount partnership, so there's some pressure riding on it.

Silly, but the right kind?

When the first teaser dropped last December, Den of Geek's take was that it looked about as goofy as the 1994 film, and meant that as a compliment. The difference is the source material. The '94 movie famously treated the games like a loose suggestion, swapping the tournament for a muddled military plot. The new footage leans hard into the actual games: classic gis, recognizable fighters, and at least one car getting destroyed, which is about as faithful as it gets.

Reviews weren't widely out when this was written, so we're not going to pretend to know if it's good. The real question is whether a movie can be campy on purpose and still land punches. Mortal Kombat fans have opinions on how hard that is.

If you want to warm up first, the original 1994 movie has aged into a cult favorite, mostly thanks to Raúl Julia chewing every piece of scenery he could reach as Bison. Pair it with an evening of the game on whatever you've got. Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection covers the arcade-era games most of us actually played.