New Street Fighter film hits major setback

Street Fighter is nearing its 40th anniversary at this point with adaptations all over the place, but it’s been a long time since Capcom’s iconic fighting game was on the big silver screen.

Although there is a new Street Fighter film in the works that’s been building some early anticipation, the project has apparently hit a significant setback.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the Street Fighter movie lost its duo directors.

Brothers Danny and Michael Philippou are reportedly no longer attached to the co-production of Legendary and Capcom after they previously talked about how excited they were to work with the fighting game’s world and characters.

The split reportedly comes down at least partially to scheduling conflicts with the Philippou twins moving their creative focus to Bring Her Back with Studio A24, who they previously made the hit Talk to Me for, while Legendary and Capcom were said to want to start up SF production soon.

There is, however, no mention in the report of creative differences leading to the Philippous stepping away from the fighting game adaptation.

Even if the studios do wish to get the new Street Fighter underway in the near future, this loss does still set them back quite a bit, especially with how little is confirmed about it.

Danny and Michael Philippou were pretty much the only names attached to the film, so now we don’t know anyone who’s confirmed to be working on it.

Legendary did recently reveal the first promotional poster for Street Fighter last month, but that was basically just a logo on a brick wall that should look familiar to fans.

“We definitely want to pay tribute to all the Hadoukens and all the characters’ powers,” said Danny via Collider last year. “I think that’s an amazing thing to be able to translate and put on screen. To create some of those impossible moves on camera I think would be incredible.”

The film was first announced in April 2023 after Legendary acquired the rights to produce Street Fighter films and TV shows with Capcom also stepping in to co-produce the project.

There’s still no date or anything else really concrete for the movie plans aside from it not apparently having started production yet, so it’s looking like the earliest we’d probably see a release date at this point would be in 2027.

Street Fighter’s original 1994 film made Capcom a buttload of cash, and some of the anime films are still beloved to this day though its overall history with the medium is mixed to say the least.

Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li was the last live action movie attempt for the franchise that is one of the absolute worst adaptations ever, but at least the web series ending with Street Fighter: Resurrection eight years ago made up for that a bit.

Capcom has not shied away from adaptations for their other popular properties including Resident Evil, Monster Hunter, Dragon’s Dogma and the upcoming Devil May Cry animation though they’ve been slow to pull the trigger on more Street Fighter while their competition has not.

There was of course the recent Tekken Netflix anime as well as the live action Mortal Kombat 2 now slated to release next Fall.

The recent SF6 Season 2 trailer reveal for Terry, Mai, Elena and M. Bison was done in an anime style too, so it’d certainly be cool to see that fleshed out into a full production for the new age at some point.

As for the Street Fighter film, it seems like we’ll be waiting quite a while before anything tangible is produced and actually revealed to the public.

Image via Street Fighter (1994).