Last night’s Game Awards revealed the first trailer for next year’s Street Fighter movie, and people’s reaction has been excellent to watch. Given the source material, and the multiple straight-faced attempts to make it work as a movie over the last few decades, there was a base assumption that this would be another self-serious attempt to make a dramatic action movie. When it was clearly not that, but instead something that looked both fun and even funny, the world reacted with a collective “huh?” But to solve the puzzle, there’s one important piece that people missed: the director.
Street Fighter is being directed by Kitao Sakurai. Who’s that? you ask. Kitao Sakurai is the director of 62 episodes of The Eric Andre Show.
If that doesn’t mean anything to you, this should help:
And now we’re all on the same page.
I think it’s really worth watching the Street Fighter movie trailer again, following the above.
I was pretty sure that was Eric Andre dancing behind the news desk as Don Sauvage for a split second there the first time I watched. And yup, it is! And it all starts to make so much more sense.
As social media filled with memes about the extraordinary new look for Guile, and game sites tried to comprehend what they’d just seen, it was all reasonably skewed by prior expectations. Me too! And Kotaku in general! Ethan’s take was to call the trailer “surprisingly good.” It’s only been 16 years since we were served Andrzej Bartkowiak Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li (a 17 on Metacritic), and no one can shake 1994’s Steven E. de Souza version, starring Jean-Claude Van Damme and Kylie Minogue. There was no reason to think that we should hope for something better this time, either. So watching the trailer, preconceptions were so heavy that it was almost impossible to see what was really happening.
What we actually see in this trailer is deranged. With the blinkers of pessimism removed, every cliched pose, every choreographed punch and kick, starts to reveal what it truly is: a goof. Seriously, look closer. That hoary old shot of Zangief pulling the tractor—there are two bored men sat on top of it, one reading a paper. The crash zoom on Andrew Koji’s Ryu, a shameless Bruce Lee rip-off moment—that’s on purpose. And Noah Centineo looking like the Ken doll version of Ken Masters—that also makes much more sense. In this light, Guile’s spectacular (and faithful!) flattop is no longer an anomaly, but a natural part of events.
Now factor in the details like how Kyle Mooney has a character in this film, and how Sakurai’s more recent work has included Twisted Metal, and his only previous feature film was the surprisingly good genre-bending comedy Bad Trip starring Eric Andre and Lil Rey Howery, and there’s no way to believe this new Street Fighter movie isn’t going to be a weird-ass comedy from start to finish.
Heck, given the pacing on The Eric Andre Show, the frenetic trailer might even match the final experience.
