Hyde Park Entertainment and Capcom have hired Andrezj Bartkowiak, the director of Doom and Cradle 2 the Grave to helm the movie adaptation of the Street Fighter video game. Remember this is the guy whose adaptation of Doom was treated with the uppermost of disgust by most reviewers and when all was said and done, delivered a movie that couldn’t break even for Universal despite the popularity of the source material.
Unlike the hideous 1994 version starring Jean Claude Van Damme, the 2008 Street Fighter movie will follow the Chinese character of Chun Li, in what is another of Hyde Park Entertainement’s P.R. move to bring the Asian culture to the Hollywood mainstream of cinema.
Production is set to begin early next year on the movie which was written by Justin Marks… the guy who is bringing us Voltron, Masters of the Universe and Super Max in the future.
You all know I proffered the darker and grittier Mortal Kombat than Street Fighter (not just video game, but movie too), so I was never going to be all that interested in this. I always thought the characters of Street Fighter were pretty dumb and this to me just sounds like it could turn out like another Dead or Alive movie.
If Doom couldn’t make a profit, I see absolutely no hope for this.
source – coming soon , variety
2 Comments
I liked the Doom movie, it was okay for what it was. As for Street Fighter I think it’s failed before it has even begun…..The main character should be Ryu and no one else, he’s asian too so I find their idea for the movie as being utter bullshit.
I sense this movie as being another lame “girl power” crap which was what they did with Dead or Alive…oh well.
I haven’t seen anything this Justin Marks has ever written, so I really don’t know if he’s any good. As far as direction goes, I didn’t care for Doom’s writing, the direction was fine by me, but then again I wasn’t expecting much…which was pretty much what I got.
BTW the first Street Fighter movie was a complete pile of crap. It was so horribly mis-cast (except Ming-Na as Chun-Li) that I cringed all throughout it. Instead of a group of musclebound, bigger-than-life demigods, we got a bunch of scrawny, uncharasmatic Hollywood B-actors. I think the guys making that movie WANTED to screw it up –if they didn’t they could have hardly have turned in a worse effort.
The story was beyond stupid, incohrent as hell, and about as pleasant to watch as a fat construction worker relieving himself. They don’t need some mid-level, untested new writer, they need an industry veteran who gets the material, and a director with enough vision to bring it to the screen intact. Right now I doubt they have either.