Hollywood isn’t a place where anyone learns from their mistakes on a regular basis, so the news that Legendary has acquired the rights to Street Fighter on film and television and started work on another reboot isn’t some groundbreaking revelation that nobody could have seen coming.
After all, the video game genre is arguably in ruder health than it’s ever been thanks to critical and commercial success stories like The Last of Us, Uncharted, and Sonic the Hedgehog, while The Super Mario Bros. Movie is poised to take a real tilt at becoming the highest-grossing console-to-screen adaptation ever made.
However, and we can’t stress this enough, both Street Fighter movies so far have sucked hard. If you take off the rose-tinted glasses and place Raul Julia’s scenery-chewing delight of a performance to one side, then the 1994 original is awful. Then again, compared to the monstrosity that was 2009’s The Legend of Chun-Li, it’s an absolute masterpiece.
To put things into perspective, the two feature-length Street Fighter flicks so far boast a combined Rotten Tomatoes approval rating of 14 percent from critics, while the cumulative average audience score is at 38 percent. The first one did turn a profit, but the second couldn’t even recoup 25 percent of its budget from theaters, but there was always going to be another bite at the cherry.
Of course, there’s always the chance that Street Fighter V3.0 could knock it out of the park and go down as one of the greats, but we’ve been burned twice before, so it’s best not to get too confident just yet.
