FIGHT! Street Fighter vs. Mortal Kombat - Which Franchise Has the Highest-Rated Movies?

With new movie adaptations of Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter hitting theatres in 2026, it’s time for fans of beat 'em up video games to once again choose their fighter in a battle that’s now been raging for 35 years. 

Ever since first landing in unsuspecting game arcades in the late '80s and early ‘90s, much to the greasy-palmed delight of teenagers across globe, Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter have been duking it out for the title of greatest fighting game of all time. And yet, with MK shifting far more copies over the years and Street Fighter arguably leaving more of a cultural footprint, that trophy is probably still up for grabs.

In that time, however, each franchise has inspired a wide range of live-action and animated movies, the success of which can be more easily defined and compared — which is exactly what we’ll do in the piece below. 

In the Midway Games corner: Mortal Kombat

Though five years younger than its bitter rival, Mortal Kombat was always the more “mature” game: a deliriously gory and famously photorealistic slugfest with catchphrases that lodged so far in your brain that you’d need Shao Kahn’s Wrath Hammer to knock them out. Today, the MK series is by far the highest-selling beat 'em up franchise in history, with over 100 million copies of its various games sold since 1992. Add to that the comic books and movies that've been released in that time and you get one of the most successful pieces of IP ever. 

In terms of cinema, the MK eras can be cleanly split into two, with two live-action movies and one animated feature released in the 1990s, and a further two and four respectively coming in the current decade. Of those live-action movies, Paul WS Anderson’s 1995 original was a big hit on release and remains a bit of a cult classic, even if critics were harsh on it at the time. The same can’t be said for the follow-up, Annihilation, which Anderson didn't direct. It probably just about broke even with ticket sales, but it also slumped to a franchise-low 4% score on Rotten Tomatoes. 

The two latest live-actions have been respectfully received for their R-Rated entertainment value but haven’t exactly raked in the cash relative to their big production budgets. With regards to the animated movies (most of which were made straight-to-VHS/DVD to promote a game), they earned plenty of praise from fans and gaming critics — especially Mortal Kombat Legends: Scorpion’s Revenge. 

With that mix, it’s not easy to give an overall score, but we can confirm that the average RT rating of the live-action movies is 41%, with an average profit of $50.6m. If it comes down to a close call, the additional TV and animated content probably gives Mortal Kombat the edge.

In the Capcom corner: Street Fighter

Maybe it’s just because more people tend to be introduced to it at a younger age, but I’d wager that the average person on the street could name you more characters from Street Fighter than Mortal Kombat, even though the latter has far outsold its rival over the years.

This is probably because the hyper realism of MK was ahead of its time while the best version of Street Fighter is still more or less the 2D classic, Street Fighter II (or some recently remastered version of it). Either way, the look is both iconic and unmistakable, as are so many of the names and characters. Given all that, it’s a little surprising that there haven't been more efforts to bring those stories to cinemas over the years. 

Since the early ‘90s (aside from a few promotional tie-ins, made for the release of certain games) we’ve got the one-two punch of the 1994 live-action and anime TV show (released in the same year), the critical and financial disaster that was The Legend of Chun Li, and the latest iterration — which has so far underwhelmed the critics and fans but at least looks on course to turn a profit. The best of these is still the Jean-Claude Van Damme original, which really did feature Kylie Minogue as Cammy White and The Addams Family’s Raúl Juliá as M. Bison. 

That movie made a healthy profit, as did the classic anime released that year, but the bank-balance-worrying hit of Chun Li leaves the Street Fighter movies’ average take at a measly $17m (altough we're yet to add the final figures for the 2026 version) and a relatively OK Rotten Tomatoes score of 36% — although the 80% held by the ‘94 anime is doing a LOT of the heavy lifting there.

Conclusion: FATALITY… for now

At time of writing, Mortal Kombat is still leagues ahead of Street Fighter on both cinema and video game screens, but the latter could yet administer a knockout Shoryuken this year if this new adaptation makes a big profit. 

At time of writing, that still looks like a longshot, but it's certainly not impossible.