Paramount and Legendary’s reboot just posted the franchise’s biggest opening ever — even if that B- CinemaScore is the bruise to watch.
By The Cinephile — CelebnMusic247
The World Warrior Tournament just won the weekend. Street Fighter opened at No. 1 in North America with $13 million on Friday — including about $4 million from Thursday previews — and is projecting roughly $31 million for its three-day opening from 3,575 theaters, according to Variety figures reported across box-office coverage.
Put that number in franchise context and it gets louder. The 1994 Jean-Claude Van Damme film opened to $6.9 million; 2009’s The Legend of Chun-Li managed $4.7 million. This reboot, directed by Kitao Sakurai and starring Andrew Koji as Ryu, Noah Centineo as Ken Masters, Callina Liang as Chun-Li and David Dastmalchian as M. Bison, passed both of those full opening weekends in a single day. It is also the second-biggest opening day ever for a fighting-game adaptation, behind only Mortal Kombat II’s $16.8 million.
Now the counterpunch. Audiences gave the film a B- CinemaScore — soft for a PG-13 crowd-pleaser — and critics sit at 42 percent on Rotten Tomatoes against a much warmer 82 percent audience score. Frank Scheck’s review in The Hollywood Reporter called it a “jumbled tonal mess” that is “only sporadically entertaining,” which is the polite version of what the B- is whispering: opening-weekend fans showed up, and second-weekend legs are a real question.
The stakes are bigger than one weekend. The film, made for a reported $82 million, is the first release under Paramount’s distribution deal with Legendary, and it is set in the 1990s, following estranged fighters Ryu and Ken, reunited by Chun-Li for a tournament hiding a larger conspiracy. Sakurai has said a sequel is being written, with its fate tied to audience reception.
So: a record opening, a divided room, and a sequel hanging on word of mouth. That is not a flawless victory — but in the fighting-game genre, it is absolutely a first round won.
Sources: Variety via Hollywood Warthog; ComicBasics
