A CGI Jason Momoa Dropkicks Ryu in New Street Fighter Clip

Somewhere in a Legendary Pictures VFX suite, an artist had to sit down and figure out how to graft Jason Momoa's face onto a green, fang-toothed mutant from a 1991 fighting game. The result, shown off in a new clip released today, is gloriously unhinged. CGI Momoa-Blanka electrocutes a prisoner (complete with x-ray skeleton flash), cannonballs through a wall, and dropkicks Andrew Koji's Ryu across a prison arena. It looks like something you'd hallucinate after falling asleep during a Street Fighter II marathon, and I mean that as a compliment.

The scene is set in what appears to be a cage match inside a penitentiary, with David Dastmalchian's M. Bison watching from above. Blanka is dragged in by guards who immediately regret their life choices when he zaps one of them. From there it's a rapid-fire showcase of signature moves: the rolling cannonball attack, a roundhouse kick, and that dropkick that every Blanka player has used to annoy their friends since the SNES era. Ryu tries to talk him down with a "I don't want to fight you," but Blanka's response is blunt: "Then, you die." Ryu charges a hadoken and blasts a hole in the wall, presumably to escape. It's 60 seconds of pure spectacle.

The VFX work on Blanka himself sits in a strange valley. Momoa's features are recognisable underneath the green skin and wild hair, but the digital alteration gives him an almost puppet-like quality in motion. Kotaku's Kenneth Shepard described it as looking like "a child's sleep paralysis demon," and I can see why. The dimly-lit prison setting doesn't help; you're squinting at a green CGI face in near-darkness. Whether that reads as atmospheric or just hard to parse on a cinema screen is going to depend entirely on how the rest of the film is graded.

Leaning Into the Absurd

What strikes me most about this clip is how committed it is to being ridiculous. This isn't a film trying to ground Street Fighter in gritty realism. Blanka literally turns a man into a glowing skeleton with his bare hands, then launches himself like a bowling ball. Push Square called it "total nonsense, but in the best possible way," and that framing tracks with everything we've seen from this production so far. The cast alone signals that nobody involved is taking this too seriously: Cody Rhodes as Guile, Roman Reigns as Akuma, 50 Cent as Balrog, Andrew Schulz as Dan Hibiki. I've been covering games long enough to remember the 1994 Street Fighter movie and the pain it caused. This one looks like it might actually work precisely because it's embracing the absurdity instead of running from it.

Momoa's Blanka also has personality here, which I didn't expect. He speaks, he taunts, he has a chirpy edge to his voice. In the games, Blanka has always straddled the line between feral beast and sympathetic character, and this version seems to lean into the lethal-but-aware end of that spectrum. Whether he gets significant screen time beyond this Ryu fight is unclear. The film's main arc centres on Ken (Noah Centineo) and Ryu reconnecting after a falling out, with Callina Liang's Chun-Li recruiting fighters for the World Warrior Tournament.

The movie is set in 1993, which is a smart anchor point; it ties directly to the era when Street Fighter II was the biggest thing in arcades worldwide. The official synopsis leans hard into tournament drama and conspiracy, with M. Bison pulling strings behind the scenes. If the full film maintains the energy of this clip, where every fight is packed with game-accurate references delivered with zero self-consciousness, it could be a fun time at the cinema.

Street Fighter hits theaters on October 16, 2026.