Street Fighter (2026)’s Most Confusing Moments Explained

Static Media Add Looper on Google: Preferred Source Google Discover Kitao Sakurai’s “Street Fighter” is a fighting video game adaptation, and as such, it’s not the kind of film that you’d expect to be particularly confusing. In theory, an adaptation of a legendary game franchise should have plenty of leeway when it comes to plot holes and general confusion, as long as the characters are recognizable and the punching, kicking, and mayhem are in working order.

But it’s never like that, is it? Any franchise that has gone on as long as Street Fighter is going to have developed a bunch of lore, which means that the film is full of obscure characters and nods to the franchise’s backstory. Combine them with narrative choices that refuse to elaborate on many things, and there are many reasons why “Street Fighter” is leaving video game fans furious.

There’s a good chance that you’re going to scratch your head a few times before the movie is over. Let’s try to fix that by addressing the most confusing moments in “Street Fighter.”

Paramount/YouTube Shadaloo dictator Lord M. Bison (David Dastmalchian) is behind the 1993 World Warrior Tournament, which the movie focuses on. He is, of course, doing this for his own nefarious plans: He wants to lure out reigning champion Ryu (Andrew Koji) to convert his Hado into Bison’s superpower energy called Psycho Power.

That’s all fine and well. But why bother with the tournament in the first place, since the only thing Bison is interested in is finding Ryu? The movie establishes that secret Interpol agent Chun-Li (Callina Liang) is already working with Bison before the tournament begins, and that she can easily track down Ryu. What’s more, Bison has access to special forces that can easily subdue Ryu with non-lethal weaponry. So, why not just have Chun-Li track Ryu down and have a couple of Doll special operatives take him out while she’s confronting the guy?

The real behind-the-scenes reason is, of course, that a “Street Fighter” movie needs a World Warrior tournament. In the narrative, though, it seems that Bison is mostly hedging his bets and doing whatever he can to advance his plans. He’s running the tournament despite barely being interested, while his only motivation is Ryu. He yoinks Ryu into his prison the second he turns up, tournament be damned — so it’s entirely possible that he had other offscreen plans going on, and the World Warrior Tournament happened to be the bait that worked.

Paramount/YouTube There are 18 notable characters in the “Street Fighter” movie, and the vast majority seem like they’d be worthy to win the World Warrior Tournament. Yet, in arguably the film’s most surprising move, the winner isn’t anyone in the classic character rosters of “Street Fighter II” and beyond. Instead, the honor goes to an obscure non-playable character from the ancient 1987 game “Street Fighter,” Joe (Alexander Volkanovski). Thanks to the movie’s running gag of fighters abandoning the tournament to chase more important goals, Joe becomes the champion without fighting a single person. However, he doesn’t enjoy his flowers for long, because the demonic Akuma (Joe “Roman Reigns” Anoa’i) makes swift work of him.

Joe’s victory is surprising, but the approach makes sense when you think about it. Since the tournament is largely an aside and no one but Joe and Ken (Noah Centineo) care about winning, the winner’s sole narrative function is to give Akuma a cool and gruesome entrance. For this, Joe is a decent sacrificial lamb who’s a fun nod at the franchise’s beginnings — while also being utterly disposable.

This is a doubly clever move because every Street Fighter fan has their favorite World Warrior, and having a franchise mainstay take the gold would honestly be boring and predictable. By having multiple characters abandon the tournament and battle outside its confines, “Street Fighter” gets to have lots of fights without establishing a true tournament winner.

Paramount/YouTube One of the movie’s most mysterious characters is the sultry and obviously evil Cammy (Mel Jarnson), who serves as one of M. Bison’s most prominent stooges. While Jarnson’s character doesn’t get a great martial arts movie fight this time around like she did in 2021’s “Mortal Kombat,” she seems to be the most trusted of Bison’s minions, and proves to be pretty nifty with a rocket launcher. But what, exactly, is the deal here? Isn’t Cammy historically one of the franchise’s nicer characters, who’s far more liable to team up with the likes of Guile (Cody Rhodes) than she is to hurl thigh-themed snark at Chun-Li? She was portrayed by Kylie Minogue in the 1994 film, for crying out loud!

The thing to understand here is that we’re still firmly at the character’s origin story stage. Cammy’s costume in the movie is from “Street Fighter Alpha,” which takes place between the first two “Street Fighter” games proper. At this time, Cammy isn’t the plucky MI6 operative of the mainline games, but a brainwashed clone who doubles as Bison’s servant and backup body (it’s a whole thing). Since the “good” Cammy who’s broken out of that role won’t debut until the expanded “Super Street Fighter II” game, it makes chronological sense that she’s on the side of the villains in a movie based on “Street Fighter II.”

Paramount/YouTube For a guy played by Jason Momoa, Blanka gets surprisingly little characterization in the movie despite his comparatively ample screen time. He’s a giant green… something that resides in M. Bison’s prison complex. He’s child-like but surprisingly perceptive. His real name is Jimmy, and he wants to find his mother, which Bison used against him when he found young Blanka in the jungle. Oh, and he has electric powers because he was raised by electric eels, apparently.

It’s probably best not to think about that last part too hard, but those disconnected jumbles of information all tie into Blanka’s backstory. A survivor of a small plane crash, Blanka spent years in the jungle, accepted and adopted by the wildlife. He started gaining attributes from the animals he interacted with, which affected his appearance and physical abilities — including that electricity power, which indeed comes courtesy of electric eels.

Though the movie doesn’t dive that deep into Blanka’s history, it’s fun to see a reasonably faithful live-action adaptation of the character. After all, the 1994 “Street Fighter” movie revealed that Blanka (Robert Mammone) is actually Charlie, Guile’s (Jean-Claude Van Damme) friend who had been turned into a monster by M. Bison (Raul Julia).

Paramount/YouTube Being the overarching franchise protagonist, Ryu is generally depicted as one of the strongest characters in the Street Fighter games. So, when he goes evil, everyone’s in trouble — as he aptly demonstrates in the endgame of the “Street Fighter” movie.

If you’re not familiar with the lore of the games, you might be tempted to think that the red-eyed, monstrous Evil Ryu is a unique concept created for the 2026 movie. However, his history in the franchise is solid. Evil Ryu is effectively the version of Ryu who has given in to the dark side of his martial art, not unlike Akuma. He debuted in the “Street Fighter Zero” manga from 1996, and ultimately makes his way to the games in “Street Fighter Alpha 2.”

Evil Ryu is very villain-coded, and is the exact kind of character a franchise might can whip out whenever it wants to really up the stakes. “Street Fighter” the movie utilizes the concept very well by making Evil Ryu an integral part of Ryu’s nature that he constantly has to rein in — and when this side of him finally surfaces, his brutality is a cool surprise to aficionados and unwitting viewers alike.

Paramount/YouTube Juli (Rayna Vallandingham) is something of an odd duck in the movie. She’s a fairly obscure character from the offshoot game “Street Fighter Alpha 3,” and in the game lore, she’s inherently connected with her partner Juni, who’s nowhere to be seen here. Yet, Juli herself plays a fairly big role as one of Bison’s key Doll minions, standing on even terms with established antagonists like Vega (Orville Peck).

If we had to hazard a guess, her presence in the movie may have a lot to do with “Cobra Kai,” where Vallandingham – a real-life martial arts prodigy who started training at the age of two — appeared as the impossibly nimble Zara Malik, and gave us some of the show’s finest fight scenes. We wouldn’t be surprised if the people behind “Street Fighter” saw her “Cobra Kai” turn and frantically browsed the World Warrior roster to find a character who fits the bill.

As for where Juni is, the question is somewhat open-ended. There are several unnnamed Dolls in the movie who could technically be her, though Juli isn’t explicitly paired with any of them. Instead, it appears that whatever role Juni might have had in the movie has been given to Vega, who teams with Juli to fight Chun-Li near the film’s endgame.

Paramount/YouTube The M. Bison in the movie is a dragon ascending. Though he’s already a powerful Shadaloo dictator with many minions at his disposal, he’s not physically very strong at the beginning of the film. He’s not very keen on training, either, instead preferring to act like a sleazeball and attain power by siphoning it from strong warriors — specifically Ryu.

Compare Bison’s relatively unassuming presence to Akuma, the film’s ultimate opponent and overarching threat to Ansatsuken practitioners. Akuma is a malevolent combat demon who can traverse different planes of existence and kicks off the central conflict by killing Ryu and Ken’s (Noah Centineo) mentor and his own brother, Gouken (Don Lee). He looms over the entire movie and, as promised early on, returns in the climax to finally have his destined match with Ryu. So who, exactly, is the Big Bad here?

At the end, it’s Bison who reigns supreme. He leaves the movie with a decent amount of Psycho Power and remains on the loose. What’s more, he has Akuma’s body at his disposal, and his dramatic levitation entrance to his meet-up with Sagat in the stinger implies that he’s attained Akuma’s powers. Besides, Akuma’s danger is extremely localized: If you’re the best, he’ll come at you, but the rest can go hang. Meanwhile, Bison is an equal opportunity threat who’s a far better fit for the main villain title, just like he is in the games.

Paramount/YouTube The movie begins with a fun animated spin on the original 1987 Street Fighter tournament, with Ryu defeating major franchise villain Sagat — a hulking muay thai fighter — for the championship. Sagat is indeed the ultimate adversary in the first “Street Fighter” game, but he’s a major antagonist in the “Street Fighter II” video game, too, so it’s surprising that he isn’t present in the movie apart from the animated prologue — that is, until the stinger. The end credits scene confirms that M. Bison and his troops recruit Sagat for the potential sequel, thus effectively confirming him as a major presence in the movie “Street Fighter 2.”

In all likelihood, Sagat’s absence is another narrative decision — one that has to do with Akuma. The film’s antagonist game is deliberately goofy and over the top, and the sole “scary, brooding villain” spot goes to the demonic Akuma. As a holdover from the first game, the towering, brooding Sagat was always the odd man out in the colorful and flamboyant “Street Fighter II” boss quartet, and would have been out of place in this film. Even the considerably less serious powerhouse Zangief (Olivier Richters) seems a touch too intense at times. With Akuma (maybe) out of the picture, there’s room for at least one new serious and intense villain in the possible sequel, and maneuvering Sagat toward that position makes sense.