Paramount under Skydance‘s ownership is not slowing down, and after making a flurry of deals in the past few weeks to recruit the Duffer Brothers, Will Smith, the “Call of Duty” franchise, and the UFC, Paramount has finalized another deal, this time with Legendary Entertainment to market and distribute films that Legendary develops and produces.
First up under this deal is “Street Fighter,” which is based on the Capcom video game and is currently in production. It is being filmed for IMAX and will be released in theaters October 16, 2026.
In the broadest sense, the Legendary partnership gives Paramount the ability to release more movies, push more things to theatrical, and build more film franchises. Josh Greenstein and Dana Goldberg, who lead Paramount Pictures, said at a press event when the Paramount-Skydance deal finally closed that they wanted to ramp up to 15 films a year (its current average is around 11 to 14), and later as many as 20 films per year. Merging with Skydance was the first step at achieving that volume, but as they internally now prioritize “Top Gun 3” and future “Star Trek” movies, Legendary gives it a partner that’s proven itself with franchises on an epic scope.
Legendary’s business with Warner Bros. is still continuing. So have no fear about the future of “Dune: Part Three” or “Godzilla v. Kong: Supernova,” the former of which is in production now and the latter of which WB will release in 2027. We don’t doubt WB and Legendary will be looking to do more “Minecraft” too after that film blew up this year. Legendary also has the “Enola Holmes” movies at Netflix and has the “Pokemon: Detective Pikachu” rights.
So while there’s no major coup to report here, Legendary was without an official deal tying them to one other studio. The hope is that this deal turns out better for Paramount than it did for Sony, which released only a handful of films under a similar pact, such as the box office flops “The Book of Clarence” and “The Machine.” At the time we looked at that deal as pretty old fashioned, but Paramount’s deal also includes downstream streaming rights, something Sony simply doesn’t have. Paramount+ could use the added boost.
It also speaks somewhat to Paramount’s priorities to mine new franchises. “Street Fighter” no doubt has franchise potential as a video game IP and a clear rival to “Mortal Kombat” at Warners, and the pact with Activision for a “Call of Duty” movie, whatever that ends up looking like, is as big of an IP play as you can get. That said, the studio does still have a deal with Damien Chazelle from the prior regime, and one of the new team’s first deals was to make a splash for a package for James Mangold’s next film reuniting him with Timothée Chalamet, so auteur filmmakers are still a big part of the pie.
“Street Fighter” is directed by Kitao Sakurai and is set in 1993 to pay homage to the ’90s roots of the fighting arcade game. It follows estranged street fighters Ryu and Ken, who are thrown back into combat when the mysterious Chun-Li recruits them for the next World Warrior Tournament, a battle royale that has a conspiracy brewing behind it. Andrew Koji, Noah Centineo, and Callina Liang star in the film that also includes Joe “Roman Reigns” Anoa’i, David Dastmalchian, Cody Rhodes, Andrew Schulz, Eric André, Vidyut Jammwal, Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, and Jason Momoa.
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