Street Fighter is ready to launch into a third round against one of its most lethal opponents, Hollywood. Video game movies generally have a terrible reputation, but that supposed curse has gradually faded from the cultural conversation. Some decent entries and one or two great TV shows have proven that video game source material doesn’t automatically sink its new interpretation. The eye naturally moves to the beloved fighting game franchise that flopped twice. The 2026 Street Fighter movie can learn from its predecessors’ mistakes to deliver a better version of the World Warriors on the big screen.
While the prevailing consensus about the Street Fighter film franchise’s legacy is that the live-action movies didn’t work, the animated movies are a different story. Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie is probably the best version of this narrative ever to reach the screen. The Alpha movies aren’t as good, but they’re still a lot better than the live-action outings. Just about anyone would reasonably conclude that an animated adaptation would better fit the material, but the studio is committed to a live-action project for archaic reasons, so they’ll have to deal with a tougher challenge.
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What Happened to Street Fighter: The Movie?
|
Director |
Steven E. de Souza |
|---|---|
|
Writer |
Steven E. de Souza |
|
Starring |
Jean-Claude Van Damme, Raul Julia, Ming-Na Wen, Damian Chappa, Kylie Minogue, Wes Studi |
|
Release Date |
December 23, 1994 |
|
Rotten Tomatoes Score |
11% |
On one level, Street Fighter: The Movie is a high-camp masterpiece that deserves the cult following that it has achieved. Raul Julia’s performance as M. Bison alone places it in the upper echelon of video game movies and genre cinema in general. Unfortunately, it’s a pretty bad adaptation of the Street Fighter franchise and an incoherent mess of half-formed ideas. There’s infinite fun to be had in Street Fighter: The Movie, but it is an exceptionally bad movie by almost all reasonable standards. Fans who care about the lore obviously have the most to be upset about. In terms of translating the material, it definitely captures several of the character names, but not much else. Centering on Jean-Claude Van Damme as Guile, a choice rather obviously made to center the American military character despite hiring a Belgian actor, the plot struggles to fit the substantial cast into its 102-minute runtime. It butchers most of the characters in service of a plot that still winds up being tangled. It’s a fun experience, but it isn’t much of a Street Fighter movie. It was fairly profitable, though not a massive hit, but people generally only bring it up when discussing the folly of old video game movies.
What Happened to Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li?
|
Director |
Andrzej Bartkowiak |
|---|---|
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Writer |
Justin Marks |
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Starring |
Kristin Kreuk, Neal McDonough, Chris Klein, Michael Clarke Duncan, and Moon Bloodgood |
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Release Date |
February 27, 2009 |
|
Rotten Tomatoes Score |
3% |
Unlike the first Street Fighter movie, The Legend of Chun-Li has absolutely no charm or appeal as a fun bad movie. It’s simply a complete failure with no redeeming qualities. Just as it fell short of the original film’s cult enjoyment, Chun-Li failed to capture the first movie’s box-office success. It was a box-office bomb, a target for harsh criticism, and one of the worst video game movies of the bunch. Aside from one or two compelling fight sequences, this film is a top-down lesson in what not to do with this source material. Locking the script on Chun-Li isn’t the worst idea, but the film’s dull version of the character keeps everything miles from entertainment. It’s a disaster that deserves its terrible fate.
How Could Street Fighter (2026) Get It Right?
The new Street Fighter film has at least two additional games to pull from, but those additions to the story are a mixed bag. Street Fighter V‘s story is a bit of a mess, and Street Fighter 6 leaned away from the overarching story in favor of a create-a-character narrative. The story has always been all over the place, but a movie needs something a bit more straightforward. Previous entries tried to make main characters out of Guile and Chun-Li, leaving Ryu and Ken to the side. The last two movies also massively downplayed the mystical elements of the story, centering on slightly more grounded ideas of martial arts and military conflict. A better Street Fighter movie would capture all the franchise’s unique elements. It’s a story about a fighting tournament, but it’s just as often focused on internal struggles for peace, vengeful hand-to-hand struggles, and the fate of the world. The movies should reflect that.
Street Fighter started as an arcade fighting game, where it delivered almost all of its story through individual character endings. As a result, its story is mostly broken into chunks that feel like entirely different genres. They’ve tried a military story with Guile and a martial arts spy story with Chun-Li. Amazingly, the one thing the movies haven’t given the fans is a mystical martial arts saga about Ryu and Ken. They probably should have tried that in the first round.
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