It’s one of the most recognizable silhouettes in video game history. With six-plus feet of beefy muscle squeezed into a tight, sleeveless green shirt, the character they call Guile cut a towering figure over arcade cabinets via his blonde flattop haircut, not least of all because the do reached sizes larger than most men’s heads. This ludicrous-looking sprite is one of the many design choices that made Street Fighter II a staple of ‘90s childhoods, alongside iconography like Blanka’s green-hued skin and Chun-Li’s impossible thighs. And he was among the first things fans saw in the earliest Street Fighter movie teaser, with wrestler-turned-actor Cody Rhodes adorned in an upright, platinum wig roughly the size of a Shih Tzu on his head.
“We went through a lot of iterations,” director Kitao Sakurai confides with a weary grin. “A lot. There was some debate of ‘okay, are we really going to do this?’ But I think at that point, we’re like, ‘Yes! We have to do this.’” There were apparently versions of the design more outlandish, scaled to a size where even the filmmaker/lifelong Street Fighter super-fan could concede “that’s too far.” (The biggest being a full six inches taller than the wig in the finished movie.) But in a weird way, getting to that very threshold is a kind of mission statement for the new video game movie: they are going for “maximum fidelity,” and taking it right to the point where it strains credulity.
When Street Fighter opens Friday, it will be the second major Capcom video game adaptation of the year after Zach Cregger’s winning take on Resident Evil, and the second this year riffing on 1990s glory days in arcade style tournaments (the other being Mortal Kombat II). Yet perhaps more than any other video game adaptation in recent memory, Sakurai’s appears to be leaning into the sheer visual lunacy of its game—and away from the instincts of so many Hollywood movies that often seek to ground the absurd of comic books or video games into something approaching reality.
“I think that for a lot of years we’ve been getting adaptations that feel like, ‘Okay, what’s the gritty, real world version of this game or IP? How do ground it into the real world?’” Sakurai explains. In fact, that was one of the directions Paramount Pictures was considering when entertaining pitches on a new Street Fighter movie. “I was like, ‘Look, to do that for Street Fighter just feels wrong.’ There needed to be a different approach, and I think that more vibrant, ‘90s, having fun with the [interpretation], that embraces the colorfulness of the game and embraces the boldness of the world, felt like a fresher swing on this material.”
It also felt in line with Sakurai’s own muses. Forty-three years old and a child of both Japan and the U.S.—he was born in Kyoto but grew up in Cleveland, Ohio—Sakurai has vivid memories of playing Street Fighter II at friends’ homes on Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo. His favorite character to play “in beast mode” was Blanka, for the record, and Dhalsim when he wanted to get silly. “The way he stretched, and the floating and levitating, there was just something so unique about him that drew me in.”
But the future filmmaker also grew up aware of the differences between Western and Eastern action cinema; it was an era when Hong Kong martial artists were going to insane, sometimes dreamlike places that Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone would never dare venture.
“I grew up on Japanese anime and manga, and that was my kind of bread and butter of what I was watching growing up,” says Sakurai. “So I wanted to make a movie that did bridge those gaps. My favorite action movies were Jackie Chan and Jet Li movies, and Wuxia wirework sort of things where people are flying across the room and it doesn’t look real but it’s great, so who cares? It’s awesome! I wanted to make a movie that could support that style of filmmaking and embrace the sort of fun of that era and try to bridge the gap between Eastern and Western action filmmaking.”
Indeed, as revealed over this past weekend, Street Fighter will even feature a deliberately retro throwback to ‘90s anime styles, infamous for their colored line work and physical imperfections created by hand-brushed strokes and analog photography. Street Fighter, which is largely set in 1993, homages those techniques in a prologue that reveals the ‘80s backstory of the film’s central heroes Ryu and Ken (Andrew Koji and Noah Centineo).
Says Sakurai, “In prep, we’re like, how are we gonna actually shoot these flashback sequences? Are we going to de-age the actors? Are we gonna hire child actors? None of that felt great.” That’s when the director lit on the fact that Street Fighter already has a rich history with anime in Japan. So “the more interesting choice is let’s go ahead and do these sequences as fully hand-drawn ‘90s style animation.”
“It’s an incredibly difficult process,” he adds. “Every frame of animation is fully drawn by hand by an artist in a ‘90s throwback way. We fully went for it, and it was an incredibly expensive and painstaking thing, but I think you feel the love and effort that goes into it.”
Like the anime component, the film’s entire ‘90s setting was a “layer” that Sakurai found himself really championing. The film is of course based on a video game franchise <a href="https://comicvibe.com/the-best-vr-headsets-for-2026/” title=”The Best VR Headsets for 2026″>best associated with that era of arcade cabinets, however the film embraces this fact by occurring in a 1993 that’s more neon day-go more outlandish than the actual 1994 Street Fighter movie made at the time with Jean-Claude Van Damme and Raul Julia. Granted, the modern director almost sheepishly admits he really wasn’t “close” to that movie growing up, instead favoring the 1995 Mortal Kombat movie directed by Paul W.S. Anderson. “Tonally, I thought it just rocked. And then that was so close to the game, to the spirit of the game, so I always had that in the back of my mind, a movie that embraces the game.”
With that said, his Street Fighter in some ways is every bit as ridiculous, if not more so, than the video games. Although it pulls its punches in carefully chosen ways as well.
“I didn’t want to devalue certain elements like the hadouken,” says Sakurai. “In the game, you can shoot hadoukens a lot, but in the movie if you showed that a bunch of times, it would kind of lose its meaning. If everybody had energy attacks all the time, it starts to be a different thing… So I wanna be really purposeful about how these moves and energy attacks are being portrayed and when they come, how they come, and assigning real meaning to them. But as far as a character like Blanka, I was like yes. That was kind of a more is more thing. Let’s really lean into making this absurd character real.”
There are of course a lot of characters in the film, as well as the tournament structure that fans expect from the games (and which was curiously absent in the 1994 adaptation). Sakurai is acutely aware that fans need that competitive format onscreen, but he also is trying to balance that with the demands of building central character arcs for his three principles: Ryu, Ken, and who might just be the film’s breakout, Callina Liang as Chun-Li. The actress has indeed gone viral on social media even before the movie’s release, with the star revealing she gained six centimeters of muscle in each leg for the film.
“I was surprised [she did that],” her director laughs, “but I also kind of had this inkling when I met her and just understood what this meant to her. She’s also a hardcore gamer, and I could just tell that she had this level of unbelievable commitment. She was just the most—you could not stop her from training, day in and day out. As soon as she got the role, it was like a crazy person training.”
But there are many performances that Sakurai savors in the film, and those he’d like to expand on if given a chance. That goes for even the man underneath the comically wide flattop.
“I want everybody back,” the director says. “It was such an incredible experience with everybody. But I was very surprised by, to be honest, Cody’s performance as Guile. He’s so funny and so unexpected, and I think a lot of people are going to be really surprised by what he brings.” The hair, however, won’t be a surprise. That’s a promise.
Street Fighter opens on Friday, Oct. 16.
