The New 'Street Fighter' Film Picks the 1990s as Its Arena

Paramount and Legendary's live-action Street Fighter takes place in the '90s and hangs on a worldwide fighting tournament that brings challengers together (S15E4). The series it adapts began in arcades in the 1980s and is still popular (S15E2, S15E3).

Period-setting a fighting-game adaptation is a genuine decision rather than a decorative one. The games can present their roster as timeless; a film that plants itself in a specific decade has to dress, light and stage every fight as belonging to that decade. Placing the movie just after the arcade era that made the franchise also sets up an easy read — nostalgia for the machines — though a setting is not the same thing as a story, and the decade alone will not tell you whether the tournament works on screen.