Paramount’s upcoming Street Fighter film is shaping as much as be the most faithful live-action adaptation of the video games thus far. The trailers teased aesthetically correct characters and movesets, and the premise facilities on the World Warrior Match. The movie can be confirmed as a full-on homage to the sprawling franchise by that includes fast-paced animated sequences.
Talking with MovieWeb, director Kitao Sakurai revealed how Road Fighter will flesh out Ryu and Ken’s backstories as sworn brothers. The film finds them misplaced and estranged — Ryu (Andrew Koji) is a recluse grappling with a corrupting drive, whereas Ken (Noah Centineo) is a self-absorbed washed-up martial artist. The story will revisit them of their prime alongside the occasions that triggered their fall from grace, by animated flashback sequences.
“We had written the film the place there have been these kind of flashbacks to Ken [and] Ryu’s upbringing and their childhood, and so after we began producing it, we had been like, okay, how will we go about doing this? Road Fighter has a sort of legacy and as an IP, it is so linked to anime. And so we’re like, why do not we simply lean into that and do anime-inspired animation for these sequences and blow it out, make them loopy.”
One of many establishing flashbacks occurs within the movie’s opening sequence, that includes a youthful Ryu and Ken coaching below Grasp Gouken (voiced by Don Lee). The latter’s look expands the film’s overarching story past M. Bison, Shadaloo, and the World Warrior Match, and there is additionally a glimpse of Akuma’s arrival within the featurette. That delves deeper into Street Fighter lore that’s best explored in a sequel.
As an alternative of utilizing digital de-aging on Koji and Centineo or hiring little one actors, Sakurai opted for stylized 2D animation, hand-drawn by LA-based studio Titmouse, which had beforehand labored on high-profile tasks like Spider-Man: Throughout the Spider-Verse and Star Trek: Decrease Decks. The result’s an homage to anime, drawing from Sakurai’s artistic influences — Akira, Dragon Ball Z, and Ghost within the Shell, among many others.
“That was simply such a extra enjoyable selection. The opposite necessary factor for me was that each single body of animation is hand-drawn. It is like conventional ’90s fashion, like totally hand-drawn animation, which is like an unbelievable quantity of labor, and just like the pipeline for that’s like so lengthy, so it’s important to be making decisions like up to now prematurely. It is a completely loopy course of, but it surely simply felt like enjoyable.”
Sakurai’s Road Fighter is a love letter to manga, anime, and video video games. Its animated flashback sequences are direct nods to 1994’s Road Fighter II: The Animated Film, the franchise’s first totally animated movie. This daring mixture of live-action and animation completely captures the spirit of a sequence that has all the time been driven by its iconic ensemble of characters.
- Launch Date
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October 16, 2026
- Runtime
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119 Minutes
- Director
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Kitao Sakurai