Tag: October 2026 movies

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Street Fighter Review: Momoa Leads Epic 2026 Reboot

Round one. Fight.

On October 16, Paramount Pictures brings Street Fighter back to the big screen, and this time the people making it clearly grew up feeding quarters into the arcade cabinet. Directed by Kitao Sakurai, produced by Legendary Entertainment with Capcom, the film is the third live-action take on the fighting game series, and it looks determined to be the first one that feels like the game.

The roster

The cast list reads like someone rage-drafted their dream character select screen. Andrew Koji, the breakout star of Warrior, plays Ryu. Noah Centineo plays Ken Masters. Callina Liang plays Chun-Li, the Interpol agent who recruits the estranged fighters for the next World Warrior Tournament. Around them: Jason Momoa as Blanka, Joe “Roman Reigns” Anoa’i as Akuma, Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson as Balrog, Cody Rhodes as Guile, David Dastmalchian as M. Bison, Orville Peck as Vega, Vidyut Jammwal as Dhalsim, Olivier Richters as Zangief, Hirooki Goto as E. Honda, Mel Jarnson as Cammy, Rayna Vallandingham as Juli, plus Eric Andre, Andrew Schulz, Kyle Mooney and Alexander Volkanovski in supporting roles.

The story is set in 1993, the year Street Fighter II owned every arcade in America. Ryu and Ken, once brothers in training, are pulled back into combat by Chun-Li for a tournament that turns out to be a brutal clash of fists, fate and fury. Behind the spectacle sits a deadly conspiracy tied to their past. If they do not face it, it is game over.

Why this reboot has a real shot

Two things separate this from the 1994 and 2009 attempts, and both are encouraging. First, the director. Sakurai made Bad Trip, the hidden-camera comedy that proved he can stage chaos with a straight face and an athlete’s timing. A Street Fighter movie needs exactly that: total commitment to the absurd, played without a wink.

Second, the fidelity. The teaser that debuted at The Game Awards played like a lineup of statement poses, each fighter introduced the way the arcade game introduced them. One sequence recreates the famous car-smashing bonus round, sedan and all. Another has Rhodes’ Guile hitting Vega with a leaping kick that sends him through a wall. The film leans on music, crowd noise and color-saturated lighting rather than exposition. That is a director who understands the assignment: this is not prestige drama, it is Saturday night.

The 1993 setting is smart too. It lets the film live in the era when these characters were mythology, before irony got its hands on them. And the production has real muscle behind it: Mary Parent producing, Ken Seng shooting, music by Leo Birenberg and Zach Robinson. The film wrapped in Australia late last year, and everything since has suggested confidence.

The tournament movie formula

Tournament movies live or die on casting, and this cast is a fever dream in the best way. Momoa as Blanka is inspired. Roman Reigns has the physical presence to make Akuma terrifying. Dastmalchian, one of the great character actors working, will chew every scene as Bison. And Rhodes and 50 Cent bring the kind of larger-than-life charisma the games always promised.

The risk, of course, is bloat. Seventeen fighters is a lot of screen time to share in 120 minutes. But the premise is built for it: a tournament is a machine for introducing characters fast and making you care faster. Sakurai’s job is to keep the fights legible and the stakes human. If he does, this could be the rare video game movie that plays to the faithful and the curious alike.

What to watch for

Watch the Game Awards teaser again and notice what is not there: no grim origin story, no apology for the source material, no attempt to make this respectable or important. Just ring lights, pyrotechnics and a cast that looks thrilled to be there. Sometimes the best version of a movie is the one that trusts the fun.

Make it a fight night. Stock up on NYC’s best hot chicken beforehand, and if you need something with real heat for the post-movie debate, these spicy tofu spots will do the job. Street Fighter opens October 16. The arena is truly waiting. Hadouken.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Digger Review: Tom Cruise’s Wild New Comedy Arrives Oct 2

Tomorrow, October 2, Tom Cruise stops running. He starts digging.

Digger, Alejandro G. Inarritu’s satirical black comedy for Warner Bros., opens in theaters and IMAX this Friday, and it might be the strangest big swing a major studio has taken in years. Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, described as the most powerful man in the world: an aging oil tycoon who sets off on a frantic mission to prove he can save humanity from the very disaster his drilling unleashed. The tagline says it all. A comedy of catastrophic proportions.

If that sounds like a lot, good. It is supposed to.

The setup

The film is a Legendary Pictures production, directed by Inarritu from a screenplay he wrote with Oscar winners Alexander Dinelaris and Nicolas Giacobone, his Birdman collaborators, plus Sabina Berman. The story is credited to Berman, Inarritu and Jez Butterworth. It runs 129 minutes, cost somewhere between $160 and $180 million, and was shot entirely in VistaVision, the wide, lush format Inarritu favors.

The premise reads like a dare. The richest man alive breaks the planet, then demands credit for trying to fix it. Around him orbits an ensemble that most directors would trade a kidney for: Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Huller, Michael Stuhlbarg and Jesse Plemons, with Emma D’Arcy, Sophie Wilde, Robert John Burke and Burn Gorman in support. Behind the camera, the cavalry is just as stacked: cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, editors Stephen Mirrione and Conor O’Neill, production designer Dennis Gassner, composer Cosmo Sheldrake. Count the Oscars in that paragraph and you will run out of fingers.

Why this one is fascinating

This is Cruise’s first film under the Warner Bros. deal he signed in January 2026, and his first real collaboration with the studio since Edge of Tomorrow more than a decade ago. It is also Inarritu’s first English-language feature since The Revenant. Two heavyweights, both overdue for a new chapter, choosing to make a wild comedy about an oil baron trying to outrun his own mess. Nobody saw this coming, which is exactly the point.

Inarritu has described the shoot as joyful chaos. At Cannes he called it “insane” and said Cruise made him laugh every day, praising a comic range he had never seen from the star. A poster designed by artist Ed Ruscha was recently celebrated at LACMA. The studio is treating this like an event, not a release.

Early reactions are genuinely divided, and Warner Bros. is leaning into it. A new ad runs contradictory pull quotes side by side: masterpiece next to unpleasant, brilliant next to baffling, tied together with the line “Same film, different truth.” You can read that as marketing spin or as honesty. Either way, it takes confidence to sell a movie this way.

A comedy built like an epic

The craft here deserves its own paragraph. Inarritu shot the film over six months in the United Kingdom, entirely in VistaVision, a format that gives the image a depth and grain modern digital rarely manages. Lubezki’s involvement alone guarantees it will look like nothing else in the multiplex this fall. Even the marketing has an art-house streak: the key poster was designed by renowned American artist Ed Ruscha and was recently celebrated at LACMA, which is not a sentence you usually write about a Tom Cruise vehicle.

Cruise himself looks unrecognizable in the materials released so far: paunchy, weathered, clutching a decrepit cat on the poster. For a star whose brand is control, letting himself look this undone is the boldest special effect in the movie.

Should you go?

Here is the case for yes. Studios do not make $170 million original comedies anymore. They make sequels, and prequels, and sequels to prequels. When one of the last true movie stars and one of the great living directors decide to spend that kind of money on something nobody asked for, the only correct response is curiosity. The worst version of this movie is still more interesting than the safest franchise entry of the year.

See it big if you can. Lubezki shooting VistaVision is reason enough, and whatever you think of the satire, you will not be bored. Cruise, famously, does not do bored.

Make a day of it. Grab one of NYC’s best breakfast sandwiches before the show, then argue about the ending over hot chicken after. Digger opens October 2 in theaters and IMAX. Go decide for yourself.