The live-action Street Fighter film landed top of the worldwide box office this weekend with $51.1 million. That is a win, just a quieter one than some were hoping for, with optimists having floated numbers closer to $70 million.
It is distributed by Paramount, co-funded by Legendary and Capcom, and carries a reported $82 million budget (that figure comes from Deadline). So topping the chart is good, but once you stack marketing on top of that budget, PushSquare's write-up reckons it still has "a long road to profitability." A number-one opening that is already talking about breaking even tells you where expectations landed.
Is it any good?
Depends who you ask. Rotten Tomatoes has it at 42% from critics and 79% from audiences, which is the familiar video-game-adaptation split: the people who turned up for it had a better time than the people reviewing it. PushSquare's Sammy Barker called it "fun" and said it "captures the wide-eyed, kaleidoscope craziness of Street Fighter," while being upfront that it is intentionally garish and leans into juvenile humour.
That tracks, to be fair. This is a series about a man who throws fireballs and a sumo wrestler who claps you to death. A bit of garish silliness is not a betrayal of the source material. It is closer to the point.
We have had a run of these lately, with a Cyberpunk 2077 film also in the works at Paramount, and the pattern holds: game movies open fine on name recognition, then live or die on word of mouth. The second-weekend drop will say more than the opening did.
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