The Live-Action Street Fighter Movie Curse Has Yet To Be Broken
Street Fighter has always been more than a fighting game. It is one of the few series whose characters are recognisable far beyond the audience that plays it, and any list of the most famous faces in the medium tends to include Chun-Li, Ryu and Ken without much argument. For a lot of people, that familiarity started in the arcade. The series was a gateway into fighting games during the 1990s, a decade when the genre was a social space as much as a competitive one, and the characters carried that experience into other media. That is what makes the live-action record so frustrating. The curse in the headline is not a supernatural one. It is the simple fact that Street Fighter has never been served well by the transition to film, despite a premise that seems built for it. Adaptations of fighting games face a structural problem. The appeal of the source is...
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