Early reviews for Street Fighter have been more positive than Kalshi traders anticipated earlier this week, pushing the market's Rotten Tomatoes forecast higher.
Kalshi's forecast for the film's Rotten Tomatoes critics' score rose from 32% to 41.4%, while its current Tomatometer score stands at 43%.
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The positive reviews
Critics who gave the new Street Fighter movie a thumbs up praised it for being a more faithful adaptation of the video game than the 1994 adaptation starring Jean-Claude Van Damme.
TheWrap's William Bibbiani praised the film's willingness to embrace the absurdity of its video game origins, even as it attempts more serious emotional moments.
“Every time Street Fighter goes for the emotional jugular, and you start caring about the strained brotherly love between kung fu masters Ken (Noah Centineo) and Ryan (Andrew Koji), you’re suddenly reminded that everyone looks ridonkulous in their game-accurate costumes, that their dialogue is insipid, and a lot of their hairstyles defy physics – and maybe even god herself,” Bibbiani wrote. “Kitao Sakurai made every possible Street Fighter movie at the exact same time. For better and for worse, he succeeded.”
The New York Times' Brandon Yu wrote that the film succeeds as popcorn entertainment despite the challenges of introducing its large cast of characters.
“In execution, it’s much harder to introduce a dozen or so cartoon fighters and balance them in a story, but Street Fighter has a sturdy enough script to bear the load, even if it buckles a bit by the end,” Yu wrote.
IndieWire's Christian Zilko compared Street Fighter with Zach Cregger's Resident Evil, another video game adaptation that seeks to capture the spirit of its source material.
“A cynic might describe Street Fighter as a film always designed to be chopped into meaningless clips, better suited to piecemeal consumption on Reels than to theatrical viewing,” Zilko wrote. “A more charitable interpretation would praise its massive visual swings and ordain it a misunderstood masterpiece of expressionism.”
The negative reviews
Other critics argued that the film's emphasis on fan service comes at the expense of coherent storytelling and compelling action.
Jacob Oller of The AV Club gave the film a D-, criticizing its reliance on fan service at the expense of character development and storytelling.
“It doesn’t help that [director Kitao] Sakurai and T.J. Fixman’s script devotes the most time to the extensive roster’s least notable and most annoying fighters,” Oller wrote.
The Associated Press' Jake Coyle described Street Fighter as a “complete mess,” criticizing its chaotic plotting and lack of engaging fight sequences.
“As much as you might think a Street Fighter movie, good or bad, would at least offer up some bluntly entertaining hand-to-hand combat, it’s so messily plotted and chaotically conceived that it makes a game with six buttons seem comparatively artful,” Coyle wrote.
The Guardian's Radheyan Simonpillai praised performances including Callina Liang's portrayal of Chun-Li but argued that the film's excessive fan service undermines its strengths.
“Street Fighter is a barrage of character introductions and story arcs lifted from the games and animated spin-offs, colliding into one another in a way that makes a relatively linear plot (it’s a freakin’ fight tournament!) confusing,” Simonpillai wrote. “Did Vega edit this with his Wolverine-like claw hands?”
Despite the improvement in Kalshi's forecast, traders still expect Street Fighter to finish below Rotten Tomatoes' 60% threshold for a “Fresh” rating.
The takeaway:
Kalshi markets now predict:
Street Fighter’s Rotten Tomatoes score: 41.4%
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