The Street Fighter movie has picked up a new director – and this choice may be quite unusual.
Legendary Pictures first picked up the movie and TV rights for Street Fighter last April 2023. While they initially tapped Danny and Michael Philippou to direct the movie, the duo dropped out due to scheduling conflicts with other projects.
In spite of that, Legendary went ahead with announcing a March 20, 2026 release date for the project. That announcement was nearly half a year ago, but we just got that vital update.
As reported by The Hollywood Reporter, Kitao Sakurai has signed on to direct the movie. With nearly a year left before release, we have to assume they will move that release date at some point. Even if filming will be condensed to a matter of months, they will definitely still need extra time for editing and post-production. But at the very least, Legendary reaffirms the sense of urgency they have in completing this project.
You may assume by his name that Kitao Sakurai must be some cult action film director from Japan, but that’s not the case at all. Sakurai was born in Japan but raised in Ohio, and would make his career in America.
One of his first film roles was in cult martial arts film Best of the Best 3: No Turning Back, but he was only 12 years old at the time. Sakurai is actually best known today for directing episodes of The Eric Andre Show. So like the original directors the Philippous, he’s a comedy guy.
But there may be more to Sakurai than that. His first film feature was a genre bending martial arts thriller named Aardvark, about a blind man who enters a jujitsu club, and accidentally gets dragged into his jujitsu teacher’s past.
Aardvark isn’t quite for everyone, but it does indicate that Sakurai has done more than comedy shows and movies before. And Sakurai is well known as an accomplished director in his collaborations with Eric Andre, so there’s definitely reason to hope this could turn out well.
Perhaps what’s more important than Sakurai’s involvement, is that the producers of the film are Legendary Pictures, alongside Capcom. Capcom may have given previous partners too much leeway in how they make their Street Fighter films. But given how they turned things around between Street Fighter V and Street Fighter 6, they may also recognize they need to get this Street Fighter movie right in a way that it will properly appeal to the modern mainstream audience.
Subsequently, Legendary Pictures is one of the big modern day success stories in Hollywood movies. In particular, they have earned a reputation for film adaptations, including Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, 300, Pacific Rim, and most recently, the Monsterverse.
Legendary’s involvement does not guarantee success; after all, they also made the WarCraft movie. But Legendary Pictures still has more hits than misses, and this is only one of a broadly ambitious slate of adaptations, including a Detective Pikachu movie sequel and a Duke Nukem movie. We’ll just have to wait and see how this one plays out.
