At one stage in their careers, every filmmaker with at least one hit movie under their belt will be offered the chance to tackle either a big budget blockbuster or a well-known IP, and the Philippou siblings wasted no time signing on to reboot Street Fighter before their feature-length directorial debut had even released.
To be fair, it’s the single best-reviewed mainstream horror of the year and made a killing at the box office by recouping its budget almost two and a half times over in its opening weekend alone, but do they have what it takes to reinvent what’s statistically one of the worst franchises in the history of cinema?
The 1994 original and its even worse reboot The Legend of Chun-Li gathered respective Rotten Tomatoes approval ratings of 11 and 3 percent, which in turn means that the average Street Fighter film holds a seven percent score on the aggregation site. In short; the Talk to Me helmers could make a terrible video game adaptation that gets savaged by all comers, and yet it could theoretically still be the best of the three by a wide margin.
Either way, the duo revealed to Inverse they’re looking forward to working in a much bigger sandbox than ever before.
“We’ve never really had a budget available at all. The idea of doing that on a bigger film set and design sequences that we know we can pull off is thrilling. The more money you have, and the bigger the crew is, the slower it works. The people at Legendary seem very open to letting us work our way and not lose that essence on set.”
Of course, there’s always the chance Street Fighter V3.0 will be a universally-acclaimed smash hit, but we’ll just have to wait and see.