Finally, A Live Action Street Fighter Trailer That Looks Proud Of Its Source Material

Adapting a video game into a live-action film has always been a cursed thing: just look at the Resident Evil movies. Worse still is adapting a one-on-one fighting game franchise that popularised the genre itself. For every cult-adjacent oddity like the 1995 Mortal Kombat that barely makes it, you have a graveyard of adaptations that disappoint. Actually, let's skip that. The OG Mortal Kombat is the only good competitive fighting movie that I can think of.

And finally, just finally, the new Street Fighter film seems to be headed in the right direction. If anything, much of the trailer feels like a cutscene of an upcoming Street Fighter game made with absolutely no budgetary restrictions.

In the new trailer that Sony released at CinemaCon, we got a glimpse of Callina Liang's Chun Li on her way to reunite an estranged Ken (surprisingly, Noah Centino) and Ryu (Andrew Koji) for the next World Warrior Tournament (wait, does that mean the movie will adapt Street Fighter II?). There are Easter eggs to the game strewn all around, like the bonus stage where you destroy a car, Cammy in the Killer Bee outfit, the original Street Fighter II's announcer saying "You Win" and "Fight" (that even non-players would recognise) and Ryu's Hadouken with all the build-up it deserves. There's even Vidyut Jammwal as the esoteric Dhalsim (never in my life did I imagine a Baadshaho x Street Fighter crossover). What's more, it's Cody Rhodes acting debut as Guile (more on him later), f*****g Roman Reigns as Akuma in all his glory, and 50 Cent himself as Balrog.

What the trailer doesn't keep true to the game, it jokes about in a subtle diss at its source material (after all, Chun-Li does have impossible leg proportions for the casting and prosthetic teams to pin down). And it's all in good humour.

In fact, that's part of the reason why so many fans are loving the new Street Fighter trailer. Sony seems to have hunted down a factory of SF fanboys, locked them in a room to come up with the live action, and by the time production ended, it was pure Street Fighter fanboying. Better still, everyone looks like they had fun filming it.

And this is keeping in mind that Street Fighter is the more over-the-top franchises in the genre. Not only that, it doesn't have the plot convenience of an inter-generational family drama that the Tekken games have amassed over the years. All it has going for it is its widespread adoration as the legacy fighting game, and its gargantuan library of incredibly satisfying attack combos.

So why a Street Fighter adaptation? And that too when the previous live action failed so miserably?
For starters, live actions today mean a different thing than what it did in the 90s. And we have much to thank the One Piece live series for that.

Eichiro Oda's pirate fantasy series One Piece, one of the oldest and longest-running manga ever created, is as goofy as it gets. Instead of sanding down its absurdity "because live action should feel real", Netflix embraced it fully, complete with the neon hair and camp, kind of like how Japan does with its adaptations.

And it worked well enough for the show to have two seasons and continuing. You see, there's a reason why a successful source material is successful in the first place. Anyone who's looking for a gritty realistic series would never read or watch One Piece in the first place. But when you try to appeal to this new audience (who might or might not end up liking your watered down version), you end up alienating the core audience.

This time, it seems like Sony has caught on to the idea with the new trailer. And the best example of it is Cody Rhodes' Guile.

Now Guile, if you know him, is the stereotypical American soldier as drawn by the Japanese: a white US Air Force officer with blonde hair and blue eyes, wearing camo pants, the Stars and Stripes tattooed on each shoulder (no one would be surprised if he's MAGA). More iconic than all of that is his ridiculously cartoonish hairstyle, which stands up straight into three inches above his skull tapering outward to levels no sensible person would go for. But hey, Street Fighter is a cesspool of exaggerated racial stereotypes (just ask our Kerala-born sadhu baba Dhalsim)

In the '94 adaptation, Guile is played as a Franco-american soldier by the French Martial artist Jean-Claude van Damme. While he's one of the few saving graces of the movie because of how good van Damme was with his portrayal (I've heard that they sold posters of this Guile back in the day), it's not really the same vibe you would remind you of the American preener that the video game fans would know.

Fast forward to now, where, not only does Guile's official poster have him fixing his bonkers hairstyle, Cody Rhodes has been going around everywhere unironically dressed in his character, making jokes about Homelander and Peacemaker.

This might be one of those films that are so bad they turn out to be good, but the smartest way to go about an adaptation, it turns out, is not be ashamed of the source material. And in keeping this true to the source (including the much beloved animated Street Fighter movie), the new Street Fighter Movie is set to be on the right path altogether. It's how Greta Gerwig got Barbie right, and what the Japanese have been getting right for years now.

Of course, none of this guarantees a good film. The storyline is still just a theory, and tone alone cannot carry two hours of cinema if the writing collapses underneath it. But for now at least, it's not a “what if this happened in the real world” thought experiment, thankfully. And as long as there's a non-zero chance that this leans so far into its own absurdity that it circles back into unintentional comedy, the kind best enjoyed with friends who are in on the joke, all the marketing and campiness would be worth it's salt.