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Elijah is a freelance news writer at Polygon. He was an associate editor at The A.V. Club and Paste, and has been featured in outlets like Game Informer, Fanbyte, Unwinnable, and more. He loves media in all forms, from fighting games and horror flicks to slow cinema and visual novels. He's from the Greater Boston area.
Street Fighter's cult classic 1994 movie is free on Tubi and Pluto TV
Image: Paramount
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The latest Street Fighter movie is out, and early reactions are not pretty. The film is currently sitting at 45% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 44 score on Metacritic. Polygon described it as an “incoherent, irredeemable mess” that flounders for an overlong two-hour runtime before ending in an anticlimax. While the action scenes are apparently solid, even they aren’t quite right, as these sequences underutilize the characters’ superhuman abilities. The main subject of praise has been David Dastmalchian’s deliciously campy performance as M. Bison.
If you’re in the mood for a bad live-action Street Fighter movie with a great M. Bison performance, but you don’t want to leave the house, here’s some good news: 1994’s Street Fighter is streaming for free on Tubi and Pluto TV.
Both critics and audiences panned this Jean-Claude Van Damme-helmed picture at release, calling it goofy and unfaithful to the source material. Still, it made $99.4 million at the box office on a $35 million budget. The film’s main redeeming quality is Raul Julia’s portrayal of M. Bison, who gave the villain a gravitas that helped turn the movie intoa cult classic.
If there’s one obvious difference between this latest Street Fighter movie and the 1994 film, it’s that this 2026 version seems to have gone out of its way to portray its characters in a more “lore-accurate” way. While critics dug into the flick for what they described as emotionally empty fan service, it will be interesting to see how it lands with series die-hards, who may simply be happy to see Ryu, Ken, and Chun-Li punch guys while looking like their counterparts in the source material.
The filmmakers clearly pushed to appeal to the fighting game community, with cameos by big names in the scene like EVO winners/commentators Justin Wong and Michael “Yipes” Mendoza, as well as YouTuber and competitive fighting game player Maximilian Christiansen (Maximilian Dood). Based on early screenings, the movie currently has an 82% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.
Have there been other Street Fighter movies?
Beyond the two live-action films, there’s also Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie. This anime also came out in 1994, like the original live-action movie, and while considerably more niche, it was arguably better received. It has an 80% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes (from an admittedly tiny sample size of five reviews). As it happens, that movie is also currently available for free on Pluto TV. If you want to watch a “good” Street Fighter movie, that’s probably your best bet.