Director of 1994 ‘Street Fighter’ Defends His Movie Amid Debate Over Its Comedy: “It’s Intentionally Funny”

The filmmaker behind the first Street Fighter feature is proud that the movie franchise is still going strong.

Steven E. de Souza wrote and directed the 1994 film Street Fighter, which saw Jean-Claude Van Damme, Raul Julia and Ming-Na Wen leading the cast of the first project to adapt the Capcom video game for the big screen. After the property returned to cinemas in 2009 with the underperforming Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, the franchise is back with Paramount and Legendary’s Street Fighter, which opened No. 1 at the box office earlier this month.

“It seems to have recovered from The Legend of Chun-Li,” de Souza quips to The Hollywood Reporter about the property. The filmmaker has appreciated that the new movie includes callbacks to his 1994 film, which includes resurfacing the memorable line that Julia’s M. Bison delivered to someone whose village he destroyed: “For me, that was a Tuesday.” Continues de Souza, “It’s a lot of fun that it made that much of a dent for the fans that they want to see these Easter eggs.”

The 1994 movie Street Fighter marked the only studio directorial effort for de Souza, known for writing such films as Die Hard, 48 Hrs. and the original The Running Man. De Souza, who recently landed a deal with Gungnir Books for three graphic novels, appreciates that his Street Fighter, which collected nearly $100 million globally, has developed a cult following despite the challenging critical response.

“At that time, we got mostly brutal reviews, and the main gist of the reviews at that time used to be, ‘This movie is so stupid, it is accidentally funny,'” recalls de Souza. “Now, obviously, if you watch the movie, it’s intentionally funny. There’s a lot of comedy. Two years ago, on the 30th anniversary, there were all these revisionist pieces saying, ‘Actually, it was supposed to be funny, and this picture isn’t that bad. Now we get what it’s supposed to be.’ OK, I can live with that. It’s 30 years too late, but fine.”

But de Souza says he’s been surprised by recent social media posts praising the latest film as including more humor than the 1994 one. “They’re saying, ‘Unlike the ’94 picture, this film doesn’t take itself so seriously,'” he adds. “It’s so funny to see this being embraced for being funny and preposterous, but now the ’94 version is apparently a serious drama.”

Nonetheless, de Souza is pleased that fans of the video game are finally getting a movie adaptation that embraces the violent action of the property’s signature martial arts tournament. Kitao Sakurai helmed the new feature that stars Noah Centineo, Andrew Koji and Callina Liang

“We really disappointed the fans with the fights because, the week we were at the rating board, there had been a school shooting [in November 1994 in Wickliffe, Ohio],” de Souza says. “We had to cut the fights back to almost Saturday morning cartoon level. We also didn’t have the money or the resources at the time to really embrace the more fantastic elements of the video game, which this version does.”

In the years following the 1994 movie’s release, there was a sequel in the works that ultimately never came to fruition. With new buzz around Street Fighter, the filmmaker hasn’t completely ruled out the possibility that his work on the follow-up script could get used in some way.

“At the last minute, it got canceled,” de Souza says of the sequel. “I still have the script for that lying around, so perhaps it may see the light of day yet. Maybe they’re going to want the sequel to this one so quickly that they’ll dust that off. It’s in a drawer somewhere at Capcom.”