TITLE
Street Fighter: The Movie – What went wrong
AUTHOR
Chris Plante
PUBLICATION
Polygon
YEAR
2014
ARTICLE TYPE
Article
FROM THE ARTICLE
Instead, Street Fighter: The Movie would be a mission story with the game’s coterie of colorful characters taking sides on a global conflict. The villain would be M. Bison, a totalitarian and vaguely Eastern European general. And the hero would be Guile, a wisecracking G.I. Joe type. It couldn’t name an actor match for Bison, but Capcom knew what it wanted for its quintessentially American hero: Jean-Claude Van Damme, the most famous Belgian on Earth.Capcom wanted to include the game’s entire roster, but de Souza knew that doing so — dividing screentime between a dozen-plus characters — would cripple the story. At a stalemate, de Souza asked the room a simple question: How many of the seven dwarves can you name? No one could name all seven.
“There’s a reason there’s seven dwarves,” says de Souza, “There’s a reason there’s seven wonders of the world. There’s a reason it’s the Magnificent Seven, which is a remake of the Japanese movie The Seven Samurai. Seven is the number of characters an audience can keep in its head at any time.” So the writer set seven as a compromise, and Capcom, persuaded by the parlor trick, agreed to the limit.
And that’s when it happened. One minute, Stephen de Souza wasn’t a Hollywood movie director. The next, he was.
COMPANIES MENTIONED
Capcom
GAMES MENTIONED
Street Fighter II
PEOPLE MENTIONED
Stephen de Souza
TOPICS MENTIONED
Adaptations