Street Fighter Is Tracking for an Opening Near $30 Million, in Line With This Year's Game Movies

Paramount and Legendary's reboot opens October 16 with a cast of actors, wrestlers and comedians. Early projections put it near two 2026 releases that did not recover their costs.

Street Fighter opens in U.S. theaters on October 16, and the early projections are modest. Box Office Theory, a forecasting site, put the film's domestic opening at about $30 million in a projection reported by Dark Horizons on September 21. Other published estimates run as high as $40 million. No reviews have been published yet, so there is no Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic score, and the studios have not disclosed a budget.

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The film is the third live-action adaptation of Capcom's fighting game, after the 1994 version with Jean-Claude Van Damme and 2009's The Legend of Chun-Li. Legendary acquired the rights in 2023 and produced it with Capcom; Paramount is distributing. Kitao Sakurai, who directed Bad Trip, took over in February 2025 after the original directors, Danny and Michael Philippou, left the project. He wrote the screenplay with T.J. Fixman, and the film was shot in Australia between August and November of 2025.

The story is set in 1993. Ryu, played by Andrew Koji, and Ken Masters, played by Noah Centineo, are estranged fighters recruited by Chun-Li (Callina Liang) to enter the World Warrior Tournament. The supporting cast is the film's most unusual feature, drawn largely from outside acting: wrestlers Roman Reigns as Akuma and Cody Rhodes as Guile, the musician 50 Cent as Balrog, comedians Andrew Schulz and Eric André, and Jason Momoa as Blanka, with David Dastmalchian as the villain M. Bison. It runs two hours and is billed as an action comedy.

The projection matters because of what it resembles. Two other films based on games and toys opened in the same range this year. Mortal Kombat II started with $38.5 million and finished at $129.4 million worldwide. Masters of the Universe opened to $29.3 million and ended near $113 million worldwide against a reported budget of more than $170 million. Both figures are cited by Cosmic Book News, which has followed Street Fighter's tracking. An opening in that range does not decide a film's fate, but neither of those two releases grew from it.

The same outlet reported audience-survey data from The Quorum, a firm that tracks awareness of upcoming films. On September 1, about six weeks before release, Street Fighter stood at 39% awareness and 39% interest, down from 46% and 44% two weeks earlier. Those figures are now a month old, and they were measured before the bulk of the advertising. They are worth knowing as a starting point and should not be read as a current picture.

Several things could still move the number. The film opens in IMAX, Dolby Cinema, 4DX and other premium formats, which raise the average ticket price. Its direct competition on October 16 is aimed at different audiences: Focus Features' Sense and Sensibility and the thriller Whalefall. And reviews, which usually arrive in the final week, have not been published. If they are good, the upper end of the range is within reach.

For anyone deciding whether to go, the practical point is that nothing is known yet about the film's quality. What is known is the approach: a period setting, a comic tone and a cast chosen for personality. Viewers who want a faithful, serious martial-arts film should wait for reviews. We will publish scores and a full review once critics have seen it.

Original coverage: Street Fighter (2026): box office tracking ahead of the October 16 release