Official reports reveal that the upcoming Street Fighter film centered around Chinese protagonist, Chun Li will suffer an absence of Street Fighter front men, Ryu and Ken. Producers of the film claim that since the Street Fighter franchise is chalk full of characters, there would be many that wouldn’t make the cut. Everyone’s favorite shoto’s losing this round, but possibly will make it into sequel’s, pending this film’s success.

Uh…you can’t have Street Fighter without Ken or Ryu. It’s the rule. When it was originally announced that the central character of the movie would be Chun Li, it was an unexpected call, but acceptable. As bad as the first Street Fighter movie was on the whole, it was easy to understand that Guile was the star, since he was the American character. But cutting Ryu and Ken completely from any Street Fighter title? That’s like having Disneyland without Micky Mouse–it’s not the same.

What’s comical is that they try to support their decision by comparing this movie to the X-Men movie trilogy. They note that “major characters” like Pyro and Nightcrawler (who’ve rarely appeared in the X-Men comics in the past 15 years) didn’t get screen time until the sequels, so we shouldn’t fret if Ken and Ryu don’t show up until future movies. They also mention that fan-favorite X-Man, Gambit, never appeared in any of the movies. Yeah, and fans have complained about that since the first film. And doesn’t that imply the possibility that Ken and Ryu may never be included in future Street Fighter movies?

Disappointments continue as they have also decided that most characters that were included in the cast will not sport costumes that even resemble their video game counterparts, deemed too “silly” for a feature film. They did offer fans the consolation that Chun Li will, however, be true to form in that she will appear with her trademark hair buns.

Gee, thanks… We’ll make the few characters that we did include into the story completely unrecognizable, but we promise to get Chun Li’s hair right. This film keeps sounding weirder and weirder, the deeper into production it gets. With all that we do know, I’d be surprised if this film makes it to theaters (the DOA movie straight-to-DVD outcome sounding more likely), let alone being eligible for sequels.

But yeah…I’ll probably see it anyway.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 4th, 2008 at 3:49 pm and is filed under Street Fighter, TV & Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.