On paper, the prospect of a pair of YouTubers rebooting what’s statistically one of the worst franchises in the history of cinema is enough to strike fear into the hearts of many, but the Philippou siblings might just be worthy of being given the benefit of the doubt for their incoming Street Fighter do-over.
After all, the pair’s feature-length directorial debut Talk to Me is the best-reviewed mainstream horror of the year so far, boasting a Certified Fresh approval rating of 95 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and at the very least there’s surely no chance they’ll be able to make anything worse than the 1994 original and its disastrous 2009 successor The Legend of Chun-Li.
The two live-action video game adaptations hold a combined Rotten Tomatoes critical rating of 14 percent and a user average of 38 percent, which means the median Street Fighter flick carries respective rankings of 7 and 19 percent on the aggregation site, which is a damning indictment if ever there was one.
That’s enough to make you wonder why on earth anybody would even consider a third bite at the apple, but as they revealed to ComicBook, the Philippous are so confident they’re throwing the word “universe” around already.
“We are developing Street Fighter, but that feels different to us. There’s amazing lore, characters, and world and we’re looking to bring our style for action sequences into this universe.”
At this point, the duo are hopefully guaranteed to make the finest Street Fighter yet, but the downside is that it could suck immeasurably hard and still comfortably attain that status.