17 Years Later, Street Fighter Just Leveled Up With A Crucial Collaboration
A stamp of approval that not many adaptations receive.
It is indisputable that Street Fighter is the most important and influential fighting game franchise ever made – without 1991’s Street Fighter 2, it’s uncertain whether or not the entire genre would even exist in the same way, or if the massive community of fighting game players that keep the ecosystem alive would have even sprouted up in the first place. And yet, for some reason, it has totally failed to translate that international success to film or television. Outside of a handful of OVAs and the original Street Fighter 2 animated film, every attempt at bringing the franchise to the big screen has failed – the Jean-Claude Van Damme film was ravaged by critics and fans at the time (even though it’s gone on to become something of a cult classic, mostly due to Raul Julia’s operatic turn as M. Bison), and 2009’s The Legend of Chun-Li fared worse, with it frequently being cited as one of the worst films ever made.
With over ten years to recalibrate and workshop a new approach, it’s possible that Capcom and producing partner Legendary Pictures may have finally broken the mold, because there’s yet another Street Fighter reboot releasing in theaters later this year. Unlike previous attempts, director Kitao Sakurai looks like he’s hewing as close to the source material as possible, retaining every bit of the kinetic maximalism the games are known for – a quality that seems to have earned him a very important collaborator.
A recent clip posted by the official Street Fighter game account on Instagram revealed that the set of the film was visited by none other than Takayuki Nakayama, the director of both Street Fighter 5 and 6. Nakayama had big shoes to fill in replacing Takashi Tsukamoto, the director of 2008’s widely acclaimed Street Fighter 4 (the first mainline game in the series since 1997), but 5 and 6 were major successes in their own right, and since 2020 Nakayama has become something of a creative guiding light for the series. The fact that he was invited to visit the set is concrete proof that Sakurai is trying his hardest to honor the larger-than-life legacy of the games, unlike previous adaptations that were clearly embarrassed by the cartoonishness of the original material.
In the video, Nakayama is shown hanging out with the cast on-set and actually playing Street Fighter 6 with them, while different stars such as Andrew Koji, Callina Liang, Cody Rhodes, and Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson wax poetic about their individual relationships to the series. Nakayama himself even commends the production, stating that “the director and everyone involved in the production love Street Fighter” and continuing by stating plainly, “this is the Street Fighter I know.”
If they left Guile’s ridiculous haircut as is, there’s no way they changed anything else.
With the noteworthy failures littering the franchise’s history, there’s an understandable apprehension from the community to believe that characters like Ryu and Chun-Li will ever truly be done justice on-screen. However, the high-octane playfulness of the film’s first teaser shows that Kitao Sakurai isn’t ashamed of the source material and is intent on replicating the absurd, Saturday morning cartoon energy that makes the series so beloved. Having received Takayuki Nakayama’s blessing, it’s obvious that even with the lack of footage we’ve seen since that first look, the folks at Capcom at least are confident that fans will be satisfied when the film arrives later this year.
