Street Fighter's Ending Makes A Sequel Pretty Much Inevitable

If you’d asked general audiences back in 2010 if Street Fighter would ever get a proper on-screen adaptation, they’d probably have laughed in your face. The 1990s gave us Steven E. de Souza’s critically reviled attempt starring Jean-Claude Van Damme (although, depending on who you ask, it’s become something of a camp cult classic at this point), and 2009 gave us a frequent entry in many “Worst Of All Time” lists with Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li starring Smallville alum Kristen Kreuk as the titular martial artist. While Hollywood was figuring out how exactly to approach video games on the big screen, Street Fighter languished as a result of being a cinematic experiment not once, but twice.

However, it’s been 17 years since The Legend of Chun-Li released, and in that time Hollywood has realized that the easiest way to appeal to video game fans is by just…giving them the game on-screen, an effect that isn’t always a recipe for quality but is more often than not a recipe for making millions of dollars (look no further than this year’s The Super Mario Galaxy Movie or indie-success Iron Lung). Enter Street Fighter, a movie that doesn’t have all that much going on under the hood but also doesn’t try to outsmart the franchise, simply ripping the characters from the arcade cabinet and allowing audiences to watch them do battle the same way they would in-game. Not only is it the best film based on the franchise by a country mile, but it’s also a movie extremely confident in its own sequel potential (something SF fans would have thought impossible ten years ago), evidenced by the movie’s surprisingly abrupt cliffhanger ending.

Street Fighter’s Ending Explained

While the newest cinematic Street Fighter reboot sticks pretty close to the very loose story beats of the game Street Fighter 2, it also takes some liberties to deepen the story. The power-hungry M. Bison, leader of the criminal organization Shadaloo, throws a second World Warrior tournament in the hopes of luring Ryu out of retirement, which he has imposed upon himself after failing to save his master Gouken from the demonic entity Akuma. His plan works (mostly due to Ryu’s desire to protect his adopted brother Ken Masters), and when Ryu arrives, he’s almost immediately kidnapped and imprisoned, because the entire tournament is little more than a front for Bison to try and transfer the power of the hadouken (a concentrated blast of energy learned through patience and inner harmony) – a plan that works partially, giving the villain a fraction of Ryu’s power.

However, what Bison does not know is that Akuma has already been communicating with Ryu, trying to force him to give in to the same dark temptations that once corrupted him, and forcing his hand by promising to slay whoever wins the tournament. For a while it appears as if that unlucky victor will be Ken, until his conscience gets the better of him and he teams up with Chun-Li to free Ryu – a decision that causes him to lose by forfeit, with the winner, Joe, being served up on a silver platter to Akuma. When the demon arrives, Ryu faces him alone and temporarily loses himself in the hatred he feels for him, transforming him into the brutal and savage Dark Ryu and defeating his master’s murderer at the cost of his soul.

Of course, Ken is able to free his friend from himself by finally unlocking the power of his own hadouken (and with a little help from What’s Up? by 4 Non Blondes). But just as our heroes begin to lick their wounds and regroup, they discover that M. Bison has stolen Akuma’s body in the hopes of stealing his power instead of Ryu’s, propelling them towards a second confrontation in the sequel that will inevitably arrive in a few years. And if the thought of M. Bison with Akuma’s power isn’t enough of a threat, the film’s animated mid-credits sequence reveals yet another part of the villain’s future plans – he makes a stop to recruit Sagat, the one-eyed combatant that Ryu defeated six years ago at the very first World Warrior Tournament, and it’s clear he has revenge on his mind.

What’s Next For Street Fighter?

While it’s a shame that the film’s proper ending is undercut by a lack of resolution, it’s clear that Paramount Pictures is going all in on turning Street Fighter into a franchise. With the threat of Akuma and Ryu’s inner struggles taking center stage here, it’s understandable that co-writer/director Kitao Sakurai and co-writer T.J. Fixman would want to give M. Bison the room to be an even greater villain and the true Big Bad next time, which is obviously what’s being set up in the sequel. For as sinister as the movie wants him to be, the thought of him juiced up on Akuma’s Satsui no Hado (a power quite literally called the “Surge of Murderous Intent”) is an even more terrifying prospect.

There’s also the matter of Sagat, who we only glimpse briefly in the film’s animated opening prologue. Sagat was the final boss of the original 1987 Street Fighter game, retroactively revealed to be a Shadaloo henchman, but his arc across the series is deeper than you’d expect — the Street Fighter lore explains that he was responsible for the death of Dan Hibiki’s father, which caused Dan to go on a revenge quest of his own that culminates in Sagat throwing their match and allowing Dan to win, finally understanding the soul-ruining consequences of vengeance. It could be an interesting dynamic to reintroduce him as working for Bison under the promise of a rematch with Ryu (his murder of Go Hibiki is absent from the movie entirely), only to switch sides and become a key ally much in the same way that he eventually does in the games.

Because of the irreverent nature of most fighting game storylines, the Street Fighter team has the potential to go absolutely anywhere with the next installment. There are now six mainline games that they have free reign to take inspiration from, but it’s a safe bet to assume that once Street Fighter 2 releases, it’ll come with some familiar faces from the games we didn’t see this time around, and a whole lot more fighting.

Street Fighter releases in theaters on October 16.