Street Fighter’s Premiere at the Game Awards 2025
Viewers who tuned into The Game Awards 2025 this past Thursday were treated to an exclusive preview of the Street Fighter film adaptation, directed by Kitao Sakurai and set to release October 16th of 2026. Though following the premiere, the audience could never have anticipated what happened next. One by one, the announcer called the majority of the cast onstage accompanied by their respective characters’ voice clips from the original games.
As someone who’s watched the Game Awards for years, I’ve never seen any reveal go quite like this. The event, hosted by Geoff Keighley, often calls in surprise celebrity guests to surprise fans—last year Harrison Ford made a memorable appearance joining Troy Baker onstage as the two Indiana Jones actors stood side-by-side for the first time. But this? Never before did a near-full cast of their work storm the stage to present an award following their long-awaited first look. A few names were omitted, however; I was personally a bit bummed seeing Eric André (who portrays Don Sauvage) skipped the ensemble appearance. The energy he brings to any live event fills the room, whether through his spontaneity or other such chaos, and I felt he would be a perfect fit for the Game Awards stage. Kitao Sakurai, the director of the film, even directed Bad Trip starring the Adult Swim talk show host, and even served as director on said Adult Swim show.
Even still, it felt like the cast appearance had something (someone?) for everyone. One of my friends was overjoyed to see Cody Rhodes and Roman Reigns together on the stage, who play Guile and Akuma respectively. The film’s casting feels really solid for the most part, with even some of the unconventional picks firing on all cylinders in terms of how they hold themselves in the trailer and how they appear relative to their game counterparts.
After throwing some shade at the cast of the upcoming Mortal Kombat II, the cast would go on to present the award for Best Ongoing Game to Hello Games’ No Man’s Sky (2016), which has continued releasing multiple updates every year to build its world, the most recent one being Breach from October of 2025.
Street Fighter is one of the earliest names in gaming to have gotten a film adaptation, with animated and live-action features both releasing in 1994. However, this new crack at the IP started with the Philippou brothers of RackaRacka on YouTube, though more recently the two have directed Talk To Me and Bring Her Back for A24. Incidentally, the two turned down the direction opportunity in order to work on the latter. Kitao Sakurai was announced as the new director in February of 2025, and looking at his work directing The Eric Andre Show, in which things break and people get hurt every other minute, it’s safe to say he’s a great pick for a combat-focused film like Street Fighter seems to be.
Kitao Sakurai’s Street Fighter will be released in theaters by Paramount Pictures on October 16th, 2026.