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When you think of great video game movie adaptations, two titles surely come to mind. 1994’s Street Fighter was bright, colorful, and fueled by the inherent silliness of the source material. In 1995, Mortal Kombat delivered one of the best martial arts films of all time by embracing the brutality of the video games. The two iconic fighting game franchises could be two of the biggest box office hits of 2026, and they’re doing it by not being ashamed to be video game movies.

And why should they be ashamed? Video game adaptations, whether they are on film or on TV, are some of the biggest hits out there. But something has been missing for a while now. See, we’ve had some great platformers turned into movies in the form of The Super Mario Bros. Movie and the Sonic the Hedgehog movies. We’ve had action games turned into fantastic TV shows; just look at Fallout, The Last of Us, and Twisted Metal. However, the fighting game genre has been mostly lacking in recent years. 2026 is set to change that.

See, I wasn’t a huge fan of 2021’s Mortal Kombat. It wasn’t that it was bad; there are some solid performances and great special effects, but it felt like it was afraid to fully embrace its origins in video games. It was holding back on some of the silliness. There was no tournament and it centered on a character who wasn’t in the games to begin with, both things that made it feel like it was trying to distance itself from the source material. That isn’t the case for the new movie, which launched its marketing campaign with a fake trailer of Karl Urban’s Johnny Cage in a terrible martial arts movie before the actual trailer made us all sit through a massive character select screen for an hour before we watched it.

2026’s Street Fighter feels the same way. With a cast that includes one of the finest character actors of his generation, David Dastmalchian, as M. Bison up against two professional wrestlers, 50 Cent, and Jason Momoa, this will either be a glorious mess or the most fun I've had at the cinema in years. I have no idea what to think of this movie other than it is not afraid to do the unexpected. All of the marketing for Street Fighter has been an unashamed embrace of the video game series that spawned it, which is the first sign to me that it will be fun.

Note that I didn’t say good. When it comes to movies, “good” and “fun” are not always the same thing, which is why I’m allowed to say that these two may well be my favorite movies of 2026. If they can lock in the fight scenes and not be afraid to be video game movies, there is every chance that they will connect not just with fans of the games but also those who are looking for a fun distraction at the cinema. That means being a bit goofy and silly, as well as having the big dramatic moments that the big screen demands. 

We won’t know until we see the first trailer for Street Fighter just how hard they’re going to embrace the video games, but, between it and Mortal Kombat 2, we’re already ready to say that 2026 will be the year fighting games take over the box office. It’s about time, honestly.

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