It’s been over eleven years since the debut of the Street Fighter: Assassin’s Fist series. The upcoming Street Fighter movie, due to hit theaters on October 16 of this year, is seemingly going in a different direction compared to what was envisioned by Joey Ansah and Christian Howard (the writers for Street Fighter: Assassin’s Fist).
As it turns out, Joey Ansah recently spoke with Dextero about his thoughts regarding the upcoming Street Fighter film. During this session, he revealed that he had plans for a darker Game of Thrones-esque story to follow up after Street Fighter: Assassin’s Fist, but those plans didn’t pan out.
“I class myself, given my age, as one of the OG Street Fighter heads. I was there when Street Fighter 2 came out on the Super Nintendo. It was in the arcades,” he declared.
“Assassin’s Fist was a real, authentic love letter to Street Fighter, first and foremost, that OG generation that really know the DNA of Street Fighter in depth. And you saw the result, you saw the way it resonated with the audience.” — Joey Ansah
“I was the prime audience for catching that wave of Street Fighter hysteria. Assassin’s Fist was a real, authentic love letter to Street Fighter, first and foremost, that OG generation that really know the DNA of Street Fighter in depth. And you saw the result, you saw the way it resonated with the audience.”
Indeed, Assassin’s Fist currently holds a 94% audience approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s generally been called one of the more faithful adaptions of the Street Fighter series with other ratings typically falling no lower than 80% approval.
While Ansah can understand why the upcoming Street Fighter film is catering more towards younger audiences considering Street Fighter 6 and the success of other recent adaptions of iconic video game series to the big screen such as The Super Mario Bros. Movie or Sonic the Hedgehog, he goes into how this sort of movie is unlikely to emphasize some of the darker themes that were present in the older Street Fighter entries.
As it turns out, Ansah claims he would lean Street Fighter into this darker route if he were given the creative freedom to do so. From here, he goes into how he had planned a second and third season to Assassin’s Fist that would’ve dove into the “World Warrior” aspect of the franchise.
“It all fell apart at the start line. That was five years of my life, and it was a very painful thing for me that I guess I’m at peace with now.” — Joey Ansah
Ansah apparently poured a great deal of his time into writing the scripts for these two seasons. Sadly, his efforts were for naught as the studios ultimately canned the project.
“It all fell apart at the start line. That was five years of my life, and it was a very painful thing for me that I guess I’m at peace with now. I did a hell of a lot of work. I’ve already written this thing. I wrote a pilot and screenplay, so I’ve done a hell of a lot of work already,” said Ansah.
“The problem is this: If I could return, if I could go back in time to just after Assassin’s Fist’s release, I would have cut out the studio middle man and gone with Capcom directly to Netflix or Amazon and said, ‘We want to do this. It’s had millions of views and it was super critically well received, and we want to do hour-long episodes, another season, but we don’t need to have a crazy budget.'”
This idea of Ansah’s ultimately didn’t work out due to clashing visions with certain unnamed high-profile showrunners that were attached to the project.