Reception
Since Street Fighter was based on a video game, most film critics had already prepared preconceived negative reviews before even watching the film. One of its worst reviews came from Leonard Maltin's annual Movie and Video Guide: "Even Jean-Claude Van Damme fans couldn't rationalize this bomb, a more appropriate title for which would have been Four Hundred Funerals and No Sex (derived from Four Weddings and a Funeral)...It does, however, seem like Citizen Kane when compared to The Legend of Chun-Li."
Rotten Tomatoes gave the film a rating of 13% based on 24 reviews by critics with the consensus "Though it offers mild entertainment through campy one-liners and the overacting of the late Raúl Juliá, Street Fighter's nonstop action sequences are not enough to make up for a predictable, uneven storyline." Richard Harrington of The Washington Post noted that the film was "notable only for being the last film made by Raúl Juliá, an actor far too skilled for the demands of the evil warlord, Gen. M. Bison, but far too professional to give anything less than his best." Critic Stephen Holden of The New York Times referred to the film as "a dreary, overstuffed hodgepodge of poorly edited martial arts sequences and often unintelligible dialogue". In 2009, Time listed the film on their list of top ten worst video games movies. However, IGN stated that the film was more enjoyable than The Legend of Chun-Li.
GameTrailers ranked the film as the eighth worst video game film of all time, citing that "...the fights are awful, Guile's from Brussels and apparently, there's some cyborg soldiers we never knew about." and described the overall film as "... a total knockout."
Despite the mostly negative response, the film was a commercial hit, grossing approximately three times its budget worldwide. The film has found a small but lasting cult following as an example of a film that is 'so-bad-its-good'. Like other films appreciated in this way, most of its negative points are seen as comically surreal.
It also received two nominations at the Saturn Awards: Best Fantasy Film and Best Supporting Actor (a posthumous nomination for Raúl Juliá).
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