Street Fighter 2026 trailer: Noah Centineo on discovering he has ‘the dog in me’

When the Street Fighter video game what was at its pop cultural peak, Noah Centineo was still years from being born.

In 1991, Street Fighter II was unleashed on the world and everyone became fixated by these pixelated combat characters, lined up behind arcade machines with their loose change, calling dibs on next.

The gameplay was addictive, and the likes of Ryu, Guile, Ken, Chun-Li and E. Honda became icons.

The Street Fighter legacy has been kicking around for decades, and its long-time fans have very exacting ideas about a movie version should look like — and it certainly wasn’t the widely derided 1994 big screen adaptation which starred Jean-Claude Van Damme and our Kylie.

How can this 2026 attempt live up to all that pent-up demand, and those expectations?

“When you say it like that, it’s horrifying,” Centineo, who plays Ken Masters in the upcoming film, told The Nightly with a wry smile. “Well, thank God we finished the movie already, otherwise I would not be able to do it.

“I grew up playing the game and a lot of my cousins who were older were obsessed with it, and they were definitely born around the time that it hit its peak. So, I understand the responsibility.”

Rather than get too in his head about the existing fandom, Centineo found that deeply held love for the game was actually freeing, because it gave the filmmakers, and him, a roadmap.

“You’re not just sitting there and making something up from scratch, you’re really able to dive into the source material and Reddit threads, and learn everything you can about a character and those expectations.

“You use that to build your performance, so I thought it was fun, I thought it was great to do. The movie is wild and bat s... crazy, so hopefully people will like it and hopefully we did a good job.

“There are so many Easter eggs for the fans, it was crafted around a fan’s experience.”

One of the first approvals came from an unexpected source: a six-foot-five “monster of a dude” security guard at an early test screening.

“He did his job, he was real serious the whole time,” Centineo recalled.

“The moment that his job was complete, he tackled me against the door frame and he came a four-year-old version of himself.

“He was like, ‘Bro, you don’t understand, this game was my childhood, it was my life, I’m obsessed’. He was happy, and so, for me, that was cool. We did our job.”

That 1994 version wasn’t the only creative failure of a live-action adaptation, it’s been something of a blackhole. But since Detective Pikachu became the first video game to screen adaptation to receive a positive Rotten Tomatoes score in 2019, the genre has been living through a renaissance, creatively, yes, but certainly, commercially.

This upcoming film, which released a new trailer today, was filmed in Australia last year with director Kitao Sakurai (Twisted Metal, Bad Trip and Beef season two) at the helm and with a wider ensemble which also included Jason Momoa, Andrew Koji, Callina Liang, David Dastmalchian, 50 Cent, Orville Peck and former WWE wrestler Cody Rhodes.

That a former wrestler is in the cast shouldn’t be a surprise. Video games such as Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat and mixed martial arts competitions such as UFC have a symbiotic relationship.

Depending on who you believe, the UFC was influenced by the games, and even, in its early days in the 1990s, played up that connection in its marketing.

Centineo’s breakout role was the young adult streaming film series To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, but the jump to Street Fighter wasn’t without steps, having played an accidental spy in TV show The Recruit and a superhero in Black Adam.

But neither of those projects reached the active levels and training that was required for Street Fighter, building on his “little bit of a background” in Muay Thai and boxing.

“On The Recruit, I played this lawyer that’s operating in a spy world and he just gets the s... kicked out of him the entire show, and then Black Adam, it was really a lot of CGI and visual effects. I got super big but I didn’t really have to do anything physical for it except run and be out of breath.”

Centineo spent 12 weeks in training for Street Fighter, nine of them learning the fight choreography, picking up mixed martial arts and karate, and really honing Ken Masters’ fighting style.

“I was stoked,” he said. “I really got to get my meathead s... on and just be like, ‘I’m going to eat all the ground beef and 12 eggs a day and work out all the time and get big and bulky. It was actually fun, it was dope.

“Then you look in the mirror and you’re like, ‘Who is this guy? This guy isn’t me.’

“Turns out, I’ve got that dog in me. You know what I mean.”

Street Fighter is in cinemas on October 15