The new Street Fighter trailer debuted at CinemaCon on Thursday set to “What’s Up?” by 4 Non Blondes. If you know what that means about the movie’s tone, you already know whether you’re in.
“What’s Up?” is a 1992 rock song that became one of the most aggressively repurposed pieces of music in internet culture history, deployed so often in ironic contexts that it now functions as a signal.
It represents a winking acknowledgment that what you are about to watch is not trying to be taken seriously.
Kitao Sakurai, who directed the Eric André prank film Bad Trip, chose it deliberately. This is a movie that has decided it is going to be ridiculous, and it is proud of that.
Street Fighter, starring Andrew Koji as Ryu and Noah Centineo as Ken Masters, hits theaters on October 16, 2026 from Paramount Pictures and Legendary Entertainment.
The full trailer, the second significant look after a first teaser debuted at The Game Awards on December 11, 2025, was shown at Paramount’s CinemaCon presentation and confirmed everything the first teaser promised.
There are fighters being thrown through walls. There are game-accurate costumes and ludicrous hairstyles and the kind of special moves that look spectacular in a video game and have historically looked absurd in live-action.
Based on what CinemaCon attendees have described, this film has decided absurd is a feature, not a bug.
What Does The Trailer Show Fans?
The CinemaCon trailer runs through the roster at a rapid clip. Akuma, Dhalsim, Cammy, Vega, the World Warriors of Street Fighter’s first two games and the Alpha series all appear in what promises to be a tournament-bracket approach to the story.
The cast representing those characters is one of the more eclectic assemblies a major studio film has put together in years, which is part of what makes the whole enterprise both potentially brilliant and potentially catastrophic.
The focus of the story is on Ryu (Koji) and Ken (Centineo), two estranged fighters pulled back together when the mysterious Chun-Li, played by Callina Liang, recruits them for the next World Warrior Tournament.
The film is set in 1993, which grounds it in the exact era when Street Fighter II was consuming the quarters of an entire generation at every arcade on the planet.
Behind the tournament is a conspiracy orchestrated by M. Bison, played by David Dastmalchian. Ryu and Ken have to fight each other, fight the field, and figure out what is actually going on before it’s game over.
The trailer reportedly maintains the same campy energy that had people cautiously excited after the December teaser.
It is not trying to be the grounded, gore-heavy approach Mortal Kombat took with its 2021 adaptation.
Mortal Kombat 2 arrives in May 2026, and the two fighting game adaptations are clearly staking out different tonal territory.
Street Fighter is going the other direction entirely, louder, sillier, more self-aware. Whether that translates into something worth watching is a question October will answer.
Who’s In The Cast?
The roster of who is playing whom in this film reads like someone asked an AI to generate a list of famous people and then assigned them Street Fighter characters at random. It somehow works on paper more than it has any right to.
Andrew Koji as Ryu is the one casting choice that has been broadly praised without qualification.
The British-Japanese actor broke through in the martial arts drama Warrior, played Storm Shadow in Snake Eyes: GI Joe Origins, and appeared in Bullet Train.
He has the physical credibility and the acting ability to carry the lead role, and the internet noticed immediately when his casting was announced. “He’s gonna eat hard. Koji the goat” was a representative early reaction.
Noah Centineo as Ken Masters is the flashier, blonder, more charismatic half of the central partnership, which maps reasonably well onto Ken’s role in the games, where he functions as Ryu’s rival and counterpart.
Centineo is best known for the To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before Netflix films and a turn in Black Adam.
Jason Momoa as Blanka is the casting choice that arguably generated the most discussion. Blanka is the green, electricity-generating, wild-haired Brazilian beast of a fighter who has been a franchise mainstay since Street Fighter II.
Momoa, Aquaman, Khal Drogo, Duncan Idaho in Dune, playing him is simultaneously insane and completely logical.
He is large, he is charismatic, and he is apparently willing to do whatever this film asks him to do.
Joe “Roman Reigns” Anoa’i as Akuma is WWE’s Tribal Chief playing arguably the most powerful character in Street Fighter mythology. Akuma is the dark answer to Ryu and Ken’s master, a fighter who abandoned all moral constraints in pursuit of the supreme martial art and who can kill people with a single technique.
Roman Reigns playing him is either perfect or terrifying, and Gizmodo’s characterization of the trailer as “goofy as hell” suggests the answer is both simultaneously.
Cody Rhodes as Guile, Guile being the flat-top American military fighter who shouts “Sonic Boom” and is essentially the character most associated with the franchise’s American audience, is another WWE crossover that slots in with a kind of deranged logic. Rhodes is currently WWE Champion.
He is also legitimately good at playing a character who punches things very hard while an American flag waves somewhere in the background.
Then there is David Dastmalchian as M. Bison. Dastmalchian is one of the better character actors working in Hollywood, genuinely unsettling in The Suicide Squad, memorably creepy across his career, and M. Bison, the campy dictator villain whose original 1994 portrayer Raúl Juliá delivered one of the most enjoyably theatrical villain performances in action film history, is a character that rewards commitment.
Fifty Cent as Balrog, Orville Peck (the masked country singer) as Vega, Eric André as a character called Don Sauvage, Vidyut Jammwal (Indian martial arts action star) as Dhalsim, and UFC Featherweight Champion Alexander Volkanovski as Joe round out a cast list that no one could have predicted.
Street Fighter’s Chaotic Development
Getting here took three years and at least two significant pivots. In April 2023, Legendary Entertainment acquired the live-action rights to the Street Fighter franchise from Capcom.
That same month, the Australian brothers Danny and Michael Philippou, who had just made Talk to Me for A24, one of the most talked-about horror films of 2023, were announced as directors.
The combination of the Philippous and Street Fighter suggested something potentially darker and more stylistically ambitious.
Then in June 2024, the Philippous dropped out to focus on their follow-up film Bring Her Back. Kitao Sakurai was hired in February 2025, and the entire tonal direction of the project shifted.
Sakurai’s background is in absurdist comedy, Bad Trip is an Eric André hidden camera film with a narrative wraparound, one of the stranger theatrical comedies Netflix produced.
His hiring announced that Street Fighter was not going to be Talk to Me with Hadoukens. It was going to be something messier and more fun.
There was also a distribution detour. Sony Pictures was originally slated to release the film, with an initial release date of March 20, 2026.
Sony removed the film from its release calendar in March of this year. Paramount Pictures then stepped in, signing a new multi-year distribution deal with Legendary, Street Fighter being the first film released under that arrangement, and setting the October 16 date.
The Amazing Legacy Of The Street Fighter Games
Every person who grew up playing Street Fighter II in an arcade or on a Super Nintendo in the early 1990s carries some version of the same memory about the 1994 film.
Directed by Steven E. de Souza, screenwriter of Die Hard and Commando, making his directorial debut, it starred Jean-Claude Van Damme as Guile (not Ryu, not Ken, Guile, the American flag character) as the nominal hero, and Raúl Juliá as M. Bison in what was the actor’s final film role before his death in October 1994.
Juliá’s performance, gleefully over the top, unashamed, committed to every syllable, is one of the great unironic contributions to the canon of camp cinema.
Time Magazine has since named the film one of the worst video game adaptations ever made. Fans regard it as an affectionate cult object.
It made $99 million worldwide on a $35 million budget, which is commercially decent and critically irrelevant.
The 2009 follow-up Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, starring Kristin Kreuk, managed to be worse than the 1994 film in most measurable ways and is remembered primarily as evidence that the source material is genuinely difficult to adapt without either leaning into the camp or committing to something more grounded.
The 2026 film has, on the available evidence, chosen camp. Whether camp works for Street Fighter the way it works for, say, a Kitao Sakurai comedy depends entirely on execution.
Whether the cast can deliver something that feels playful rather than embarrassing, whether the fights have enough genuine energy to carry the moments between jokes, and whether the whole enterprise coheres into something an audience can root for is also to be considered.
October 16 is when that question gets answered. The trailer set to “What’s Up?” by 4 Non Blondes suggests Sakurai knows exactly what he is doing. Whether he is right is another matter entirely.
