The rain gets there before anybody else does. Paramount Pictures and Legendary dropped a second “Street Fighter” trailer on 1 September, and it does not open on the tournament, or the roster, or the neon skyline that the marketing has leaned on since December. It opens in an alley with water coming down hard enough to smear the neon into streaks, and two men having the worst conversation of their lives. Eighteen seconds in, one of them throws a Hadouken, and the whole pitch for this movie lands in a single shot.
We pulled the trailer down and walked it frame by frame instead of reading somebody else’s summary, and the thing that jumps out is that this is not the sales pitch Paramount ran in April. That first trailer was a roster parade: here is Blanka, here is Guile’s hair, here is a man kicking a car apart. This one is a story, and it spends its first twenty seconds on family instead of fighting. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “Street Fighter” and this trailer’s full shot order, including the cold open, the tournament bracket and the closing gag.
It opens in an alley with water coming down hard enough to smear the neon into streaks, and two men having the worst conversation of their lives.”
Here is what is actually on screen. A wet alley, empty. A face pressed close to the camera through the downpour, green and red light crawling over it. “Brother, I failed you,” a voice says. “There was darkness growing within me.” The answer comes back flat: “You’re not my brother.” At around the twelve second mark the trailer cuts to a face lit from below by purple fire, eyes burning red, blood at the mouth. Then: “Do something. What are you waiting for?” And: “Forgive me.” At 17.6 seconds a pair of cupped hands fills with blue-white light, and at 18.3 the blast goes down the alley and takes a man with it. The Paramount card lands on a coastal cliff at 21 seconds, Legendary follows on the same cliff a beat later, and the movie has not shown you a single tournament frame yet.
If you know the games, you already know what that scene is reaching for, and it is the oldest and heaviest piece of lore the franchise owns. We are going to be careful here, because the trailer never puts a name on screen and never shows a face clearly enough to call it: what is confirmed is the dialogue about a brother, the darkness, and the red eyes. The reading everybody will land on is the obvious one. Nobody has confirmed it, and we are not going to print it as fact off a rain-blurred close-up.
From there the trailer finds Ryu (Andrew Koji) in a dark workshop, and Chun-Li (Callina Liang) arrives as a silhouette in the doorway with the recruitment speech. “You were the best fighter in the world. And then you disappeared. What happened?” His answer is the character in one line: “The path I’m on now is not one of combat. I don’t fight anymore.” Her answer is funnier and better: “That’s honestly the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” She then puts three men through a warehouse to prove the point, shot in hard shafts of window light, and the hook drops at 37 seconds. “Your brother Ken is in danger.”
Ken Masters (Noah Centineo) gets the loudest introduction in the trailer and the saddest one. He is in a red gi under arena lights, flipping an opponent, arms up, hair everywhere. “I’ve spent years living in Ryu’s shadow,” he says over it. “And now I’m gonna win it all.” Then the trailer quietly undercuts him: a hotel room at golden hour with somebody else asleep in the bed, a champagne spray in an empty-feeling ring, and a close-up at 48 seconds where his face collapses. The car-smashing bonus stage is back from the first trailer, complete with a clock reading 36, and it plays as celebration rather than practice. Around 49 seconds he takes a straight right from a boxer in gloves marked Buffalo, which is the deepest cut in the whole thing.
Chun-Li’s real pitch lands at 53 seconds and it is the plot: “This tournament isn’t what you think it is. If you want to save your brother, then you must fight.” Ryu cuts his own hair off with a blade in the dark, “Round one!” hits at 1:02, and then the trailer does the single best sustained bit in its 169 seconds. A bathhouse fills with steam. A hand comes out of it. E. Honda (Hirooki Goto) does the Hundred Hand Slap through the fog for a solid fifteen seconds, the captions log it as a growl at 1:09 and a groan at 1:11, and the joke is that you can barely see any of it. That entire sequence is new. It was nowhere in April.
The nightclub run starts at 1:25. Ryu walks a room full of pink and blue tubing, Dan Hibiki (Andrew Schulz) turns up in a white tracksuit screaming, and the dialogue either side of it stacks up fast: “You win!” at 1:22, “Oh hell no!” at 1:27, “This is about to get interesting” at 1:28, “I’m gonna kill you!” at 1:31. The ON OCTOBER 16 card lands at 1:32 and then the roster gets its parade after all, but shorter and sharper than last time. Balrog (Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson) walks a mirrored corridor in a powder-blue leather tracksuit carrying a bottle of champagne. Guile (Cody Rhodes) turns to camera and the flat-top does the work. M. Bison (David Dastmalchian) appears in a red greatcoat and peaked cap. And on a set of concrete steps, flanked by troops in red berets, Don Sauvage (Eric André) screams into a Stars-and-Stripes megaphone in a magenta and gold sequin tuxedo, which tells you exactly what register this film is playing in.
The back half is where the trailer stops being polite. Blanka (Jason Momoa) gets a real reveal this time, leaping green and howling through an industrial shaft. Cammy (Mel Jarnson) fires a launcher at an armoured convoy in a neon street. Chun-Li fights her way down a candle-lit corridor in a red suit, and at 2:03 she screams into a wall of fire with her hair in the classic buns, a shot recycled straight from April and still the best image the campaign has. There is a countdown running underneath it all, seven down to one, laid over the line “To live is to fight. To fight is to live.” Somewhere in there, at 2:08, comes the one that will end up in the film’s trailer for the trailer: “I made a promise to protect you.”
Then the money shot, and it is a basement rather than an arena. At 2:17 Ken and Ryu stand side by side in a concrete service corridor, Ken in the red gi, Ryu in a white one already torn off at the shoulders, red gloves on, troops in red berets closing in around them. Six seconds later the trailer cuts to a close-up of two fists meeting, one gloved and one bare. That is the image the first trailer never had, and it is the reason this one works better: April sold you a cast, September sold you two brothers standing back to back.
The logo burns in at 2:34, and then Paramount does the thing every action comedy has done since “The Nice Guys” and gets away with it. Guile is driving a car through farmland with a bald strongman in the passenger seat. Ken, Ryu and Dan lean in through the window. “Who did that to your face, Guile?” “Oh, I don’t know, Dan.” Beat. “You know anybody in this tournament who fights with a claw hand?!” Cut to Vega (Orville Peck) tearing up a nightclub bar under blue light. The final cards read FILMED FOR IMAX and ONLY IN THEATRES OCTOBER 16, and if you freeze the rating block in the corner you get the most useful piece of information in the whole trailer: PG-13 for violence and action, bloody images, strong language, sexual references, partial nudity and brief smoking. That is a long list of qualifiers to hang off a PG-13, and it is the closest thing we have to an answer on how hard this film is willing to hit. The 1994 Van Damme version carried the same rating and fans have spent thirty years asking for the mean one. This looks like a PG-13 being stretched as far as it goes.
What is missing is worth as much as what is new. We ran both trailers through the same process, and three things that got real screen time in April are absent here: Dhalsim (Vidyut Jammwal) and his fire, the caped figure under the World Warrior Tournament banner, and Chun-Li’s classic blue qipao, which was the single most fan-service image in the first cut. The animated MTV bumper gag is gone too, and that one stings, because it was the clearest signal that this film knows it is set in 1993. Our read is that Paramount is holding the costume reveals back for October rather than that the scenes are cut, but that is a read and not a fact, and the honest answer is that a second trailer that drops the qipao is making a choice we cannot see the reason for yet.
The thing we keep coming back to is the tonal split. Kitao Sakurai came off “Bad Trip”, and this trailer is happy to put a man in a sequin tuxedo with a flag megaphone next to a scene about a brother who let the darkness in. Video game adaptations usually pick a lane and die in it: too grim and it plays as embarrassed by the source, too silly and there is nothing to hold onto. “Street Fighter” opens on grief and closes on a claw-hand joke, and whether that is range or whiplash is going to be the entire argument about this film. The trailer at least earns the benefit of the doubt, which is more than the 1994 version ever managed.
What Do You Think? Is that rain-soaked cold open the film committing to the darkest story in the Street Fighter canon, or a prologue that gets forgotten the moment the tournament bracket starts? Does dropping Chun-Li’s blue qipao from the second trailer read as Paramount saving the reveal for opening weekend, or as a marketing team getting nervous about how the costumes play? And after thirty years of this franchise being adapted badly, is a comedy director the right call, or exactly the wrong one?
Catch up properly: every Street Fighter game, film and series in chronological order on our Timeline Hub’s Street Fighter timeline.
See you on the next binge!
