The new Street Fighter movie has landed in theaters, and while it delivers plenty of fan-service moments and striking 2D animated flashbacks, critics say it stumbles on a fundamental point: it barely uses the fighting tournament at its center. That choice echoes a mistake the 2021 Mortal Kombat reboot already made, and the filmmakers appear not to have learned from it.
The film draws its cast and premise from Street Fighter II, the most famous entry in the game franchise. An animated pre-title sequence folds in the first World Warrior tournament and Ryu's victory over Muay Thai master Sagat, giving backstory for Ryu and Ken Masters. The main plot picks up six years later, when villain M. Bison stages a second World Warrior tournament to lure Ryu into the spotlight and steal his Hado power — the energy behind his signature Hadoken move.
Yet the tournament itself is treated as an afterthought. Bison shows only cursory interest in the competition, quickly kidnapping Ryu and retreating to his lab to drain his power. Ken's bid to become champion to prove himself to his late master Gouken accounts for only about half of his story. Ryu never competes at all, despite defeating E. Honda beforehand to earn a roster spot. Chun-Li, the only woman who competed in the game, is also absent from the action.
The result is a bewildering viewing experience. The tournament «begins» in the second act by jumping in after a fight has already ended, with Guile eliminated off-screen by Vega. Other bouts are skipped entirely, and multiple rounds are decided by forfeit because a character is busy elsewhere for plot reasons. Fan favorites like Guile and Zangief never get a proper showcase beyond an early nightclub brawl among the contenders.
That makes it hard to invest in the tournament scenes that do take place, since the film makes clear the competition is not a priority. It is disappointing not just because a Street Fighter movie offers too little fighting, but because the same narrative stumble already played out in Mortal Kombat.
The 2021 Mortal Kombat reboot did well enough financially to secure a sequel, but it was a creative mess. Instead of centering beloved game characters in a tournament between champions of different realms, it tried to endear fans to newcomer Cole Young and never actually featured the namesake Mortal Kombat tournament. Villain Shang Tsung's plan was to prevent the tournament by killing Earthrealm's champions before it could happen — a strange gambit that worked backward from genre expectations rather than delivering on them.
Fan backlash focused on the excised tournament and unwelcome lore changes, including the infamous «Arcana» tattoos that gave champions special powers. The more warmly received Mortal Kombat II subsequently dropped the Arcana concept, a sign that audiences wanted the straightforward tournament framework the games are built on.
For Street Fighter, the lesson is plain. A fighting game adaptation does not need to reinvent its source material's central structure. The tournament is not incidental window dressing; it is the engine that gives every fight stakes and every character a reason to be there. By marginalizing it, the new film joins Mortal Kombat in a category no franchise wants to occupy: adaptations that sideline the very competition their titles promise.