To outlast the best and bring Street Fighter to the big screen, stunt coordinator John Valera paid close attention to the combat styles in the video game.
Noah Centineo, who plays Ken Masters in the Paramount adaptation of the Capcom video game, which premieres Oct. 16 in Imax, credited Valera with capturing the “different fighting styles” of the game’s many characters.
“Every character comes from a different background, pretty much, right?” he explained to GamesRadar+. “So there’s like over almost 150 characters, all the different backgrounds, different fighting styles, and John Valera, our stunt coordinator, had to research for every character and every fight that they were in their specific fighting style.”
Centineo added, “Yes, the signature moves in the game [are in the movie], so that he could make them fight against each other in their signature styles, in their specific fighting styles. Meticulous attention was paid to detail, and I think it’s really a triumph. The movie has insane fights, and every character is brutal.”
Co-written and directed by Kitao Sakurai, Street Fighter also stars Callina Liang as Chun-Li, Joe “Roman Reigns” Anoa’i as Akuma, David Dastmalchian as M. Bison, Cody Rhodes as Guile, Andrew Schulz as Dan Hibiki, Eric André as Don Sauvage, Vidyut Jammwal as Dhalsim, Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson as Balrog, Jason Momoa as Blanka, Don Lee as Gouken, Orville Peck as Vega and more.
Based on the video game series that launched in 1987, the latest Street Fighter adaptation comes after Jean-Claude Van Damme led the 1994 live-action movie, followed by 2009’s Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, starring Kristin Kreuk.