Legendary Entertainment's live-action Street Fighter film opened at No. 1 in the United States over the weekend, pulling in an estimated $31 million domestically according to studio estimates reported by Anime News Network. Add another $20.1 million from 65 overseas markets and the global opening lands at roughly $51.1 million.
IMAX did a fair share of that work. Premium large-format screenings brought in $7.7 million worldwide, split between $5.4 million in the U.S. and $2.3 million from overseas theaters.
The number is not what the production had in mind. Deadline reported that staff had been hoping for something closer to $70 million, and $51 million is a long way from that. The film carries an $82 million production budget, which sounds worse than it is. Theatrical is one revenue stream among several, and Legendary is expecting home video, streaming licensing and other ancillaries to close the gap over the next year or so.
A distribution deal with something to prove
Street Fighter is the first film released under the multi-year distribution agreement Paramount Pictures and Legendary signed last December. The studio handles Legendary's films worldwide with one exception: China, where Legendary East runs distribution. That makes this opening a test case for both companies. A mid-range result on the first title of a new deal is the kind of thing executives notice.
Legendary picked up the film and television rights to Street Fighter back in April 2023 and has said it will work with CAPCOM on future projects. The road here was not straight. Sony Pictures was originally set to distribute, with a March 20, 2026 release date, until Sony pulled the film from its calendar in March 2025.
Kitao Sakurai, best known for The Eric André Show and Bad Trip, directed. Shooting took place in Australia and started in August 2025, after Danny and Michael Philippou dropped out as directors to focus on their own film, Bring Her Back.
The franchise has been here before
Street Fighter has a long, uneven history in live action. The 1994 film starred Jean-Claude Van Damme, Raúl Juliá, Ming-Na Wen, Damian Chapa, Kylie Minogue and Wes Studi, and it is remembered more for Raúl Juliá's M. Bison than for anything else. HYDE Park Entertainment produced a separate spinoff, Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, with Kristin Kreuk in 2009. Neither is fondly recalled.
Television tried too. Machinima's Street Fighter: Assassin's Fist went up on YouTube in May 2014, and Funimation licensed it for a North American Blu-ray release that October. A second series, Street Fighter: Resurrection, ran on Verizon's go90 between March and April 2016. A Street Fighter: World Warrior series was announced in 2018 and never happened.
Anime fans have their own version of the canon. Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie adapted Super Street Fighter II in 1994, and Discotek Media put it out on DVD in December 2015 and Blu-ray in October 2016. That film still gets cited as one of the better game-to-anime conversions, mostly because it took the material seriously instead of playing it for laughs.
The games keep the brand in circulation regardless of what the films do. Street Fighter 6 launched in June 2023 for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC through Steam, and arrived on Nintendo Switch 2 in June 2025 as a launch title. The Street Fighter 6 Years 1-2 Fighters Edition shipped the same day.
What the opening actually means
A $51 million global start puts the film in the "fine, not great" bracket. It is the top movie in America this weekend, which is worth something for marketing, and the distribution deal means the company has years of runway to figure out whether this franchise works on film. But a Street Fighter movie that opens below internal projections is a reminder that game adaptations still struggle to convert nostalgia into tickets outside a handful of exceptions.
The sequel question depends on legs, not opening weekend. If the film holds through the next two weekends, the conversation changes. If it drops hard, Legendary and CAPCOM will be back to the drawing board on how to handle a property that has already survived three failed live-action attempts and one very good animated film.
Source: Anime News Network, citing Deadline and studio estimates.
Source: Anime News Network, citing Deadline and studio estimates
Featured image: Poster for Legendary Entertainment’s live-action Street Fighter film, via Anime News Network.
