I wasn’t sure if I was the only one, but early reaction to the delightfully ridiculous collectible popcorn bucket for the new Street Fighter movie tells me I wasn’t.
You see, the casting of multiple pro wrestlers and comedians gave me hope that Street Fighter wouldn’t tread the same ground so many reboots of old properties do these days, with a point-of-view character or two yanked out of the real world and ironically introduced or reintroduced to the wacky, wild world of whatever 1980s or 90s franchise
is being “reimagined”. The early marketing materials and even the first trailer kept hope alive. The second trailer revealed that the plot was… a P.O.V. character getting yanked back into the wacky world of Capcom’s classic fighting game.
Granted, they’re not shying away from the original video game elements, the combat looks fun, and Cody Rhodes got some funny lines. Still, with that plot reveal, the new Street Fighter went from “see in the theaters” to “check out when it hits a streamer I get”.
And then we got the Guile-hair shaped popcorn bucket. And it’s WEARABLE!
ShutUpAndTakeMyMoney.GIF
These collectible buckets became part of the standard marketing rollout for blockbuster-hopefuls a few year ago, and leapt into the stupid (and I’m using that as compliment) with Dune 2’s Sandworm/fleshlight. This is what I want Street Fighter to be —dumb fun. Not Ryu’s dramatic quest to save Ken.
Perhaps because, as Public Enemies Podcast points out, the screencaps Discussing Film grabbed are…
… that particularly tweet helped change the mind of New York Times-bestselling author (and one of the people who made me want to write things on the internet) Shea Serrano:
And YouTuber Chris Parker:
So here’s hoping Street Fighter is as goofy as its wearable Cody-as-Guile’s hair popcorn bucket.
