Thank god, I have a reason to write about Street Fighter that isn’t that damn incest plotline fiasco in Street Fighter 6. A new trailer for the upcoming live-action Street Fighter movie is out today, and it focuses pretty heavily on poster boys Ryu and Ken, who are both going through a rough patch with each other and in their careers as fighters.
The movie is coming out on October 16, and the trailer shows a fair bit of the film’s fight sequences which, regardless of what else happens in the movie, seem pretty dope. Fighting game storylines are usually pretty minimal and silly, and we’ll see how the movie handles the actual narrative and dialogue when it comes out later this year, but what it does seem to nail already is cool fights, and that alone might be worth the price of admission. There are also some clear crowd-pleasing moments sprinkled throughout, such as Ken beating up a car like in the Street Fighter II bonus stages, Cammy making a reference to Chun-Li’s thunder thighs, and of course Ryu powering up a Hadoken fireball.
Narratively, Ken and Ryu seem to be the focus. The former has become, as Chun-Li puts it, a “sideshow,” or a washed-up has been. Ryu, meanwhile, has gone off the grid and been a drifter, until Chun-Li finds him and drags him into a tournament where the two rivals will finally face each other again. Obviously there’s a grand conspiracy surrounding the tournament, as M. Bison is here, which means the Shadaloo organization is probably involved somehow. But the trailer doesn’t get too into those details. The whole thing is giving ‘90s camp. Watch the full trailer below:
Street Fighter’s cast is pretty stacked, not just with Noah Centineo and Andrew Koji leading the film as Ken and Ryu, but with some inspired pulls in the supporting cast as well, such as Jason Momoa as Blanka. We’ll see if this merry band of misfits coalesces into a half-decent film or just becomes a big montage of references like the Mario movies in October.