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The original Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat 90s movies are messy, ridiculous, and absolutely iconic [Gamify My Life]

With new entries in the fighting film franchises coming out in 2026, let's take a look at how Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat took vastly different approaches to greatness.

Image credit: Universal Pictures / Popverse

Features by Trent Cannon, Senior Contributing writer

Published on Mon Feb 23 2026

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We all love video game adaptations now, but there was a time when they were new and unusual. Many of them were, unfortunately, very bad. However, 1994’s Street Fighter and 1995’s Mortal Kombat movies remain classics, and I am ready to fight anyone who disagrees. Despite both being based on iconic fighting games from the era, Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat tackled creating film versions of said video games in entirely different ways – and that is what makes them so uniquely wonderful.

Let’s clear the air a bit. Street Fighter is not a good movie. It is many, many things; hilarious, entertaining, camp, but good? That is a bigger stretch than Jean Claude Van Damn’s signature splits. The acting is uneven, and the plot is simply nonsensical. The issues that plagued production, from Raul Julia’s health issues to disagreements with Capcom over casting decisions to JCVD’s notoriously difficult-to-manage behavior, are catalogued elsewhere, but the result of that chaotic production is a movie that leans into some of the most absurd aspects of the video games.

Raul Julia As M. Bison In Street Fighter — Image credit: Universal Pictures

Street Fighter is a big-budget mess of a movie that somehow is endlessly fun to watch. Raul Julia swings from silly monologues where he is chewing scenery in a wide-eyed frenzy to delivering one of the most devastatingly brutal lines of dialogue any action movie villain has ever given. The fight choreography isn’t particularly noteworthy, but you don’t mind because it is so unashamedly silly that you have fun watching it. It is a tongue-in-cheek love letter to the Street Fighter series that somehow became a box office hit.

A year later, we got Mortal Kombat at the cinema, and it took a drastically different approach by being a generally good movie with a much more realistic tone. Where Street Fighter featured a massive cast of characters from the games, Mortal Kombat focused on just a handful of familiar faces. It had, arguably, the more difficult task to adapt its source material for the big screen – in 1995, you simply didn’t get convincing four-armed giants like Goro on screen with CGI, after all – but managed it because it was made by a competent filmmaker in director Paul Anderson and some inspired casting.

Liu Kang Vs Sub Zero Motal Kombat 1995 — Image credit: New Line Cinema

The original Mortal Kombat film is a love letter to practical effects. Despite the grand locations and the brilliant set design, most of the memorable moments in the film are simply the fight scenes. Where special effects are used extensively, such as the fight between Liu Kang and Sub-Zero, they are there to supplement the fight choreography. Anderson used his budget to maximum effect, spending on things like the Goro puppet to avoid making the mistake of relying on special effects that simply weren’t up to the task at the time.

And those fight scenes are spectacular. Johnny Cage versus Goro is surprisingly fun to watch, considering one is a bit of a goofball character, and the other is a giant puppet that can barely move. Arguably, the best fight choreographed fight in the film, Liu Kang versus Reptile, was practically made up at the last minute because focus groups felt the original cut lost its momentum in the third act, something that was possible partly because Robin Shou, who played Liu Kang, was experienced as a Hong Kong stunt person and martial artist.

Shou, Linden Asbey, and Bridgette Wilson are all great as Liu Kang, Sonya Blade, and Johnny Cage, but the real star of Mortal Kombat is undeniably Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, who rocked the role of Shang Tsung so hard that the video game developers changed the character’s appearance in the games. He is equally terrifying and charismatic; while he isn’t quite as over-the-top in his performance as Raul Julia as M. Bison, Tagawa is every bit as iconic.

Street Fighter lives and dies on how much cheese you like in your movies, while Mortal Kombat is a solid martial arts film without a lot of fluff. Both deserve mention when you talk about video game adaptations, even though they’re vastly different movies. Which is why seeing both the long-awaited reboot of Street Fighter and the emergence of Karl Urban’s Johnny Cage in Mortal Kombat II both happen in 2026 is such a uniquely spectacular way to celebrate their vastly different but equally enduring legacies.

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