Street Fighter is shaping up to have a halfway decent box office haul this weekend, though we’ll now have to see how these new reviews, released only a few hours before you can actually see the film, affect its prospects. It certainly isn’t good news, given these early results from Rotten Tomatoes critic reviews.

Street Fighter is a throwback to the days when most video game movies reviewed terribly, whereas recently we’ve had a resurgence of (mostly) higher-quality film and TV projects. Street Fighter has a 34% Rotten Tomatoes critic review score, which is far off base from the recently released 95%-scored Resident Evil. Far lower than the positively reviewed Sonic movies. And while The Super Mario Bros. movies didn’t get “fresh” scores from critics, they made up for that with a combined $2.3 billion at the box office. There’s really no spinning this for Street Fighter. You’re going back to 2016’s Warcraft (29%) to find a similar score. And we really are not all that much higher than Borderlands (10%) in 2024. Street Fighter definitely has of the worst review scores of any video game movie in the last decade, and as one of the highest-profile projects, to boot.

There’s a general idea that movies that studios believe will not review terribly well should hold their review embargoes until the last minute. That isn’t always how it looks, but we saw it from the dismal Other Mommy last week. Other Mommy, however, went on to earn a good amount of money, so there’s something to be said for the strategy, I suppose. We will see if that works here for Street Fighter.

Street Fighter is a comedic, campy take on the long-running fighting video game that is, of course, quite comedic and campy itself. It set out to be extremely faithful to the games, and while it may have achieved that, many fighting games…don’t always have the best stories to begin with. Street Fighter’s movie and game rival Mortal Kombat has already had two films released, no comedy and more blood, which scored middling-to-decent with critics, but with high audience scores . That could end up being the case here with Street Fighter, but it’s too early for those Rotten Tomatoes audience scores to hit yet. These are very, very low critic scores, however.

One frequent complaint from critics in these reviews is that the movie ends abruptly and is way too focused on setting up a sequel rather than telling a complete and satisfying story in this first iteration. While sure, it stands to reason that, like Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter wants to return for more, there is a limit to how much weight should be put on a cliffhanger ending.

It has to deliver at the box office. Mortal Kombat earned $84 million worldwide, hardly a blockbuster and reportedly dead even with its $80 budget (pre-marketing). But that greenlit Mortal Kombat II, which increased its fortunes to $129 million globally. There’s no word on a third film yet. Street Fighter also reportedly has an $80 million budget, but whether the revenue goals are the same for making a separate film remains to be seen.

Street Fighter’s competition this weekend may help it quite a bit. It stands to reason Other Mommy isn’t going to return with huge numbers. Both Sense and Sensibility and the highly-scored but very esoteric You Can See Everything aren’t expected to make more than $10-12 million each. If Street Fighter can get $25-30 million, that’s not bad. That’s on track with the first Mortal Kombat at $23 million, where the second film earned $38 million its opening weekend. It does seem possible that Street Fighter is going to follow a parallel track here. We will find out over the weekend once audience scores and box office results come in. But woof.

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