As somebody who dropped more than my share of quarters into a Street Fighter 2 arcade machine back in the day (and even a few in the original Street Fighter machine), I can’t pretend I’m not looking forward to the upcoming Street Fighter movie. The cast of Street Fighter is absolutely insane, in the best way.
One member of that cast is current WWE Champion Cody Rhodes, who will play the classic character Guile. In a recent appearance on The Pat McAfee Show, Rhodes confirmed that Guile would pull off all his signature moves in the movie, and also revealed that he insisted on doing all the movie’s physical work himself. Rhodes said;
The physicality part of Guile was, I felt like, a pretty easy pick up, and a bit of a spoiler for what's going to be, I hope, a monster movie: Guile does a few things in terms of the video games. You know, Guile's going to do a sonic boom. Guile's going to do the flash kick. I was adamant that anything that’s a stunt, I want to do it. If that requires me being on these wires, I want to do it. If you put another guy over here in the corner who I know is gonna do the shot after, I still want a shot at it.
As a fan of Street Fighter, I love that we’ll see Guile pull off superhuman moves like the Sonic Boom, Guile’s projectile attack similar to Ken and Ryu’s famous Fireball, as well as the Flash Kick, which sees Guile do a complete backflip in midair while also kicking somebody in the face. It’s the sort of thing that, in a more “serious” attempted adaptation, they might try to skip, but it’s just not Street Fighter without that sort of thing.
I mean, just look at him go...
However, as a wrestling fan, I’m more torn on Cody Rhodes doing his own stunts. While I think it’s great that he wants to do them, and I’m sure he was able to do a lot of the stunt work himself, there’s always the possibility of injury, which could potentially take him out of WWE if only for a short time. I’m reminded of Amy Dumas, WWE Hall of Famer Lita, who performed her own stunts on a TV show in the early 2000s and broke three vertebrae, which nearly ended her career in the ring.
Rhodes is clear that while he apparently attempted all his own stunts, he may not be the one doing them in the movie. It’s possible there were things he couldn’t quite do, and stunt men were brought in for that.
Still, it appears that everything is working out fine, and Rhodes talks up the new Street Fighter movie in a big way, indicating that the set of the production looks very much like the video game come to life. It even has a final boss, though not that final boss. Rhodes continues:
That movie, if you ever played the game, particularly Street Fighter 2, what Kitau Sakurai has done as the director is unbelievable. It's just fan service. I mean, if you just saw us all walking around the lot in Australia, you've got Dhalsim, you've got Ken, you've got Ryu, you got Chun Li, the real...I don't want to say the real final boss, but in that game, you know.
The Final Boss is one of the many nicknames that The Rock has given himself. In this case, the final boss is expected to see Street Fighter villain M. Bison, played by David Dastmalchian. The new Street Fighter movie is currently set to hit theaters in almost exactly one year, on October 16, 2026.
