Hyde Park Entertainment is currently scheduled to bring Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li to theaters in March 2009, courtesy of co-financer Capcom Entertainment and Hollywood distributor 20th Century Fox. The film's producer, Patrick Aiello, talks to GameDaily BIZ about this new direction for the Hollywood Street Fighter franchise, which stars Kristen Kreuk as Chun-Li, Michael Clark Duncan as Balrog, Neil McDonough as M. Bison, and Chris Klein as Nash.

GameDaily BIZ: What was it about Street Fighter that interested you as a film, especially after Capcom originally had done Street Fighter: The Movie back in 1994 and failed to find an audience with that?

Patrick Aiello: Ashok Amritraj, who is the CEO of Hyde Park Entertainment, for whom I work, came up with the idea of doing the Street Fighter film. Ashok has younger children -- teenagers -- who are very immersed in technology and the video game world.

BIZ: Are you starting from scratch like Batman Begins, forgetting that the original Street Fighter movie ever existed?

PA: Correct. That dealt with a whole suite characters; we're not going down that road. We're dealing with specifically Chun-Li, Bison, Balrog, and Vega as they relate to Chun-Li and the separate worlds of good and evil.

BIZ: Street Fighter has a lot of characters. Are you looking at this as the Chun-Li story to have its own path and then if future Street Fighter movies come out you would have the Ken and Ryu or whatever story? Or would you have these characters interact like characters in Iron Man and The Hulk?

PA: We don't know yet.

BIZ: Are you open to those ideas?

PA: Of course. There's going to be a variety of paths to take this branded franchise down.

BIZ: How much leeway did Capcom give you when working with the Street Fighter mythology for this big screen outing?

PA: This picture is driven by story and character. This is a video game movie that is driven by characters in the story. The action is an organic result of the conflict that our characters find themselves in. We took great care to construct our characters' starting point, so when we watched them grow in separate directions, good and evil, the fighting scenes would be out of natural conflict and make sense. It's very much like Batman Begins in that sense.

Chun-Li, seen here in SFIV, is at the heart of the upcoming movie

BIZ: Back in 1994, Capcom had the video game movie and then they released a new game based on the movie featuring Jean Claude Van Damme. Are there potential crossovers for you guys with Street Fighter IV?

PA: Capcom is releasing Street Fighter IV in 2009, which is the 20th anniversary of the game. The film and game release dates will coincide, but I'm not certain how much of the game will coincide with the story because ours is a very partitioned off origin story of the Street Fighter universe. So the release dates will coincide, elements between the two will coincide, but in terms of them relating to each other perfectly, I don't believe that's the case.

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