I never thought I’d write these words in my life, but Cody Rhodes, why can’t you be more like Jean-Claude Van Damme?
At Thursday night’s Game Awards in Los Angeles, Paramount revealed what it is officially calling a “sneak peek” of the 2026 Street Fighter (Oct. 16) film. The teaser “went over big” at the video-game awards show, a person in the room tells The Hollywood Reporter. Well, it was not as well-received in the living room of this particular Hollywood Reporter… reporter.
The 45-second clip starts fine — we see Ryu’s (Andrew Koji) clenching fist à la the Arthur meme, Rhodes’ fellow WWE Superstar Roman Reigns (Joe Anoa’i) as Akuma taking a shower or something, Zangief (Olivier Richters) pulling a tractor, Chun-Li (Callina Liang) standing around looking like “Chun-Li” — and then we get to Balrog (Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson) and his stupid video game haircut. (Prepare yourself now, because dumb hair is going to be a big theme in this story.)
Balrog’s hair, which sort of looks like an “M” from the front, in the video games is stupid. The boxer’s hair in the coming live-action movie (and frankly, the 32-year-old one) is a perfect facsimile of Balrog’s hair in the game and is, thus, stupid. It’s also not the worst hair in the teaser.
After snippets of Dhalsim (Vidyut Jammwal), E. Honda (Hirooki Goto) and Cammy (Mel Jarnson), there is a shot of a bleached-blonde floating flat top — yes, Guile (Rhodes) has entered the arena.
We get a few more exact-replica-character-establishment shots before we see Guile in full — full-on Somersault Flash Kicking Vega (Orville Peck) through a wall. That’s when we get the full scope of how absurd the colonel’s flattop ‘do is. I mean, it’s got to be six inches tall — maybe more.
Amid some dimly-lit (but good!) quick-cut fight scenes (and a great backing track), is Don Sauvage (Eric André) looking goofy as hell. In a way, it all looks goofy as hell. Well, the roundhouse kicks are pretty crisp.
For a non-animated film, Street Fighter (2026) looks quite cartoonish, and that’s not because of the exaggerated bicycle kicks. The characters are exact character models — hair, clothes and everything — to the ones in the video games. At times, it looks like bad CGI, only the movie is not CGI. I can suspend my disbelief only so far: a feral boy raised in the Amazon grows up to be green with orange hair? Sure. Guile’s barber agreeing to this bullshit? No way.
Before you tell me I’m missing the point, let me assure you that I’m not. I love Street Fighter. I grew up on Street Fighter 2, Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam in a magical building called an arcade. In 1991, when Street Fighter II: The World Warrior debuted, entire games had to be packed into and presented in 16 bits; Street Fighter 6, the current game in the series, is 64 bits (and it’s great). When the pixels were poor and the screens were worse, these over-the-top cartoony physical traits were once needed to differentiate character models. Today, everything is HD, if not 4K.
In the early 1990s, the Street Fighter craze led to a rushed-together feature film. Basically, Universal booked a big name for good guy Col. Guile (Van Damme) and for bad guy M. Bison (Raul Julia, in what would be his final film role), and made a shitty movie entirely reliant on new IP and a top-loaded call sheet. It sucked. Like, it really, really sucked — but the trailer is better.
The one mistake the OG live-action Street Fighter movie didn’t make was making its humans look like no human you’d ever see in the real world. Like, in ‘94, Guile just had spikey hair — so did I. Relatable.
The Mortal Kombat movies do a better job adapting a straight tournament-based fighting game to film. A darker tone and established backstory presenting many different realms helps sell the world(s) we see. Baraka is an alien; it’s fine. The other thing Mortal Kombat has going for it is that the games were historically animated by digitizing actual actors. (Today it is motion-captured semi-realistic 3D.) The (real) people we saw on the big screen looked like the (real) people we saw on the tube-TV-backed arcade cabinets. There was no need to re-imagine a drawing into the flesh.
To be clear, I’m not declaring Street Fighter (2026) a dud — it’s way too soon for something like that, the sample size is far too small — and I’m still rooting for it to rule. I just hope that by the time the full trailer comes out, the character builds are a bit more palatable for this Player One.
Paramount’s been here before. Remember in 2019, before COVID, when the world’s biggest problem was Sonic the Hedgehog having human teeth in the first trailer for that ‘90s video game adaptation? The film’s director Jeff Fowler heard the feedback, performed a mass-extraction, and a major movie franchise was born. Let’s do that again; could we maybe buzz Guile’s flattop in post?
