Street Fighter is getting another movie, and this time it’s a co-production between Legendary Pictures and Capcom. The franchise has already had a handful of film and television adaptations, both animated and live-action, and they were received with mixed reviews.
The one most people seem to always bring up was the 1994 live-action Street Fighter starring Belgian action hero Jean-Claude Van Damme, The Addams Family‘s Raúl Juliá, Marvel/Star Wars/Disney actress Ming-Na Wen, and Australian singer and actress Kylie Minogue, among others.
Regardless of the fact that the film was critically panned during its release, the film was still a commercial success for the studio, earning around $100 million with a budget of only $35 million. There were some smaller budget projects that came after, and rumors went around that a high budget tv adaptation would eventually come out.
Capcom has adapted some of its other highly successful video game franchises like Monster Hunter and Resident Evil, with the majority of the live-action projects being directed by Paul W. S. Anderson and starring his wife Milla Jovovich. Unfortunately for the bulk of fans of the games themselves, the movies did not deliver on a quality experience that fit the theme or tone of the video games but still managed to bring in a tremendous deal of revenue for the studios involved.
It does leave one to wonder, will the upcoming Street Fighter film take a similar approach? Though we don’t know how the film is going to play out, we do know who are being considered for starring roles. It’s a veritable cast of ripped and/or jacked action stars, which lines up perfectly with authenticity to the video game’s characters.
In talks for roles in the film are the WWE‘s Roman Reigns, Warfare‘s Noah Centineo, Bullet Train‘s Andrew Koji, and most recently A Minecraft Movie‘s Jason Momoa. If the project continues as planned this will be the second live-action movie adaptation of a popular video game franchise that Jason Momoa will have starred in, as he just this year appeared in the box office mega-hit A Minecraft Movie as I mentioned before.
Only four weeks after release, A Minecraft Movie earned $816.6 million at the global box office, and even though the movie had a stronger opening weekend than similar video game based Jack Black vehicle The Super Mario Bros Movie, it seems to have lost hype more quickly, which leaves it with a much larger gap to close before it becomes as commercial of a success.
With all of that said, these are all things that studios take into account when making decisions regarding films, and when there are live-action adaptations of beloved video game franchises that are making loads of money, and the studio itself has a history of making quite a tidy profit from previous endeavors in the same space, it only makes sense for Capcom to strike while the iron is hot, potentially increasing their player base for the video games as well.
I’m curious to see if Capcom follows through, and if they do, if there is a large enough audience still interested in a live-action adaptation of the fighting classic. We’ll see soon enough.
