Capcom and Legendary’s upcoming Street Fighter movie will likely be as divisive as the original, Jean-Claude Van Damme-led attempt to bring the fighting-game franchise to the big screen. Director Kitao Sakurai’s adaptation of Street Fighter is taking a bold, stylized, filled-with-professional-wrestlers approach, with The Eric Andre Show levels of manic energy.
Sakurai is also hewing very closely to what’s featured in the Street Fighter games, accurately recreating iconic moves like Ken and Ryu’s Hadouken and Tatsumaki Senpukyaku, Zangief’s Russian Suplex, and Chun-Li’s Spinning Bird Kick. It doesn’t look like Sakurai is taking the tone excessively seriously, which means this looks like it’ll be a good time at the movie theater.
Street Fighter‘s first full trailer shows that Sakurai is trying to work as many Easter eggs and deep-cut appearances into the film as he can. While Capcom and Legendary are clearly going for a broad audience, like any good video game movie adaptation should, Street Fighter still needs to cater to the fans.
Here are some of the more amusing and reassuring nods to Street Fighter games, movies, and ephemera that we (and fans) have spotted in the Street Fighter trailer.
A classic Chun-Li vs. Vega fight
Vega’s getting his ass kicked left and right in the trailer for Street Fighter, both by Chun-Li (Callina Liang) and Guile (Cody Rhodes). Vega (Orville Peck) is a classic villain archetype who wears a mask to maintain his good looks, and is memorably portrayed as an assassin sent to kill Chun-Li in the 1994 anime Street Fighter 2: The Animated Movie.
Some fans are interpreting this shot of Chun-Li as a direct reference to an infamous scene from The Animated Movie, in which she is shown naked and showering while Vega watches. Chun-Li and Vega battle after that gratuitous showering scene, resulting in a fan-favorite and spectacularly choreographed fight that is full of lurid shots of Chun-Li’s… underwear.
In reality, Chun-Li may be doing something altogether different in the above scene from Street Fighter. Later on in the trailer, we see Ryu (Andrew Koji) and E. Honda (Hirooki Goto) battling in a sauna, with towels strategically covering their nether regions. Perhaps we’ll see Chun-Li in similarly steamy action there too.
