I titled the post as such because these days, nobody has any qualms with regurgitating titles of films of the past with any ambiguation and I want to make clear that I’m talking about the brand new Street Fighter film circa 2026, and not possibly the 1974 film of the same name starring the late great legend Sonny Chiba, or the 1994 turd with Jean Claude Van Damme that had the unfortunate distinction of being Raul Julia’s last film, or the 1994 animated classic that as far as I’m concerned is still the pinnacle of the core Street Fighter II canonical story.

Because the 2026 film was absolutely everything I thought it would be, and I left the theater with absolutely no surprises or disappointment of expectations.  Unfortunately, my thoughts on what this film was going to be were nothing short of a colossal steaming goat turd, and it did a pretty good job of staying close to that bar pretty much the entire film.

When I heard that this film was coming out, I vaguely remember saying either to myself or to mythical wife, that there would be no way in hell I would go to see this in a theater, unless I were going with the boys, because there’s no way this had any chance in hell of being remotely decent.

And as much as I’m a wrestling fan, finding out that both Cody Rhodes and Roman Reigns were going to be in it, as Guile and Akuma respectively didn’t help alter my preconceived notions about the film, and in fact probably hurt them, because wrestlers are generally campy over-the-top performers often times to begin with, and the thought of Cody dropping lines as US Colonel Guile made me just know he was going to be bringing the cheese, and frankly I wasn’t a single iota wrong about that.

But, the boys did come knocking, and when one of them pinged the group chat to see who was interested, and that he had a deal from work on the table, I couldn’t say no, because I love the boys and their company, and as shitty of a movie I figured this was going to be, it could be fun with their company, and so I went to the theaters for the first time in like forever, to watch Street Fighter (2026 film).

If I had paid money and expected to see something satisfying and fulfilling on top of being entertained, I’d have been sorely disappointed.  If I went by myself, or had to pay for mythical wife or anyone else to come watch with me, I’d have left the theater feeling disappointed.  Thankfully, the boys are also actual SF gamers, and had the capability to understand a lot of the niche and inside references throughout the film.

But overall, the film is campy, riddled with plot holes, wonky character direction, and I feel like they went too off-balance at trying to be true to the source material versus executing a plot that is actually humanly possible to portray with live human beings.  They shoe-horned the original eight from SF2 and oddly cherry picked Cammy and Juli from later games, seemingly on account to fill out female cast numbers.  And their determination to make game-references seemed to overwhelm the need for an actual plot.

Casting was weird, and the way I describe it is imbalanced, because they went to great lengths to try to carve out all this plot and depth for Ryu, Ken and Chun-Li, but then went very hard and literal to have all the other character portrayals.  Like Cody Rhodes as Guile, the big French MF from Reacher to be Zangief, and the guy they got to play Dhalsim were about as perfect live-interpretations as there could be.  Fiddy as Balrog seemed like a weird choice considering his lean stature versus Balrog’s hulking portrayal, and my friends and I were discussing how difficult it is to portray a decent Vega in all the attempts that have been made in SF film history.

I didn’t even know that Ma Dong-Seok was what I’m guessing was supposed to be Sheng Long but for whatever reason re-named Gouken, because of all the facial prosthetics and trying to make him like some weird Korean-Japanese Pai Mei, but I was tickled to see that he was a part of this.

Like many, I found it puzzling that they cast an Asian girl to portray Cammy, despite the fact that she’s very much a white British girl, so that was some weird reverse appropriation going on there.

But the core players, casting was, well cast.  None of them are people I’d really ever heard of except for Andrew Schulz and the guy that played M. Bison, but all of their characters were really weakly written, the story was not at all decent, and I couldn’t help but wonder if there was a degree of intentionality with how just overall bad everything was, as if a group of bros got high and started bullshitting about how if they make a movie that’s just bad enough, it’ll get people to want to see it, so they can partake in the shit show that the film actually turned out to be.

Like the dude who was M. Bison, I just couldn’t get over the actor choice.  The dude who was the Polka Dot guy in Suicide Squad, and Mr. 3 in One Piece.  Always the quirky weird character, suddenly having to be the very rigid and very stoic M. Bison.  Plus his stature is kind of wimpy to be the last boss of the game, and honestly he probably would’ve been better to be Vega, given his stature and how a mask would hide his deadpan face.

I felt like this whole film was some brainchild of maybe Andrew Schulz, Eric Andre and David Dastmalchian, among others, and like I said, they probably got high and started kicking around an idea of a Street Fighter film, and since many of them probably have the clout and connection to Netflix and/or their investors, the ball got rolling, and then this turd emerged.  But at the same time, I feel like even they had to know this was turning out to be a stinker, but were somehow okay with it, because if you’re going to be bad, be legendarily bad so that it can still draw interest.  Like some weird meta cat-and-mouse game of trying to be bad on purpose, because it’s easier than trying to win an Oscar, and when the day is over, entertaining and earning are still the key objectives to why they’re doing it in the first place.

In the end, this movie was pretty turrible, the only enjoyment I got from it was from the company I went to go see it with, and the fact that they left it open for a future sequel(s) is hilarious because it’s awfully presumptuous to think that they should get one, but Hollywhite loves to burn money, and we’ve all seen shittier things get additions to them.

It wasn’t all pure shit though; the animated segments they used to portray flashbacks, that shit was straight fire.  If the whole film were done animated like it was done in these segments, probably would have improved the film at least twenty-fold.  I’d definitely be interested in future content from whatever studio did that animation, because that stuff was definitely quality.