30 years ago today, Steven E. de Souza's live-action adaptation of Capcom's Street Fighter series hit movie theatres in North America and became part of video game folklore.
Starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, Raul Julia, Ming-Na Wen and Kylie Minogue, the movie cost $35 million to shoot and earned just under $100 million at the global box office, but it was mauled by critics and fans alike.
Speaking to The Guardian in 2018, writer and director de Souza discussed some of the issues relating to the shoot:
I couldn’t talk about it at the time, but I can now: Jean-Claude was coked out of his mind. The studio had hired a wrangler to take care of him, but unfortunately the wrangler himself was a bad influence. Jean-Claude was calling in sick so much I had to keep looking through the script to find something else to film; I couldn’t just sit around for hours waiting for him. On two occasions, the producers allowed him to go to Hong Kong, and both occasions he came back late – on Mondays he just wasn’t there at all.
Despite this, it has gone down as something of a cult classic, and Capcom recently pointed out that it continues to earn the company money, even after all this time.
Since 1994, we've seen a second Street Fighter movie in the form of 2009's Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, which bombed critically and commercially. In 2014 the Street Fighter: Assassin's Fist webseries was released as a movie, and gained widespread acclaim from fans.
At the time of writing, another Street Fighter film is in the works at Legendary Entertainment, with a proposed release date of March 20th, 2026.