After twin directors Danny and Michael Philippou sent the horror world into a tizzy with their excellent A24 frightfest Talk To Me, Legendary Entertainment and Capcom wasted little time recruiting the writer-director duo back in April 2023 to helm a rebooted adaptation of Street Fighter. They were fans of the game franchise, saying, “We’d love the chance to do big set pieces of a big budget because even on our YouTube stuff, we’re designing stunt rigs that had never been done before. And to do that on a grand scale, man, I feel like we could create something no one’s ever seen before,” as expressed to Collider at our SDCC 2023 studio. Fans’ collective hearts broke in June 2024 when they pivoted to direct their upcoming horror film Bring Her Back, with schedule conflicts resulting in their exit from the adaptation.
Collider’s Jeff Ewing attended an LA preview event for Bring Her Back, where the brothers revealed a set of new scenes (hint: they’re very creepy) and answered questions about the film. During the Q&A, they discussed the reasons for their pivot away from Guile, Chun-Li, Dhalsim, and friends, and towards their new Sally Hawkins-led frightfest. The Phillipou brothers finally revealed the various factors that precipitated their surprising exit from the project.
They Exited ‘Street Fighter’ To Make Original Horror While The Momentum Is There
The brothers first noted that the choice of making Bring Her Back, which was written “at the exact same time” as Talk To Me, was simple: “It was because it was the script that was closest and was the most exciting to us,” Danny Philipou explained. He continued to explain his hesitancy in making IP-driven films:
“The IP stuff I would usually stay away from, not because I don’t want to do it but because I don’t want to f*ck it up… there’s things with such big, in-built audiences, I’d hate to let a whole bunch of people down, like ‘what the f*ck was that,’ ‘I’m so sorry.’ That’s my nightmare, pissing off all these people, these dedicated fan members. And if we’re getting a remake, obviously the original is amazing, [prompting fears around being] talented enough.”
Michael emphasized that, on the one hand, the brothers’ YouTube career provided some advantages, as “through YouTube we were able to get a lot of those smaller ideas out and onto the screen, all those little things like tiny set pieces and fight scenes… we’re able to do those things.” Bigger projects were another story entirely. “The bigger ones, which have been boiling in our head for years, we haven’t been able to make them yet.” As a consequence, when given “the opportunity to make them, we’re so thankful, because it will never leave your head until you make it… there’s so many original movie ideas we want to do that we kind of want to stick with that.”
He continued to discuss the Street Fighter project specifically. “We were developing big IP, it wasn’t horror, but Street Fighter,” he explained, “and we were actually really excited for that. Developing that was a lot of fun, but just finding the time for it, it just didn’t line up properly for us, and so we decided to focus on the original stuff.” It simply came down to choosing to strike with original ideas while the iron was hot.
“I think we’d f*ck it up,” Danny reiterated. That’s unlikely, if the quality of Talk To Me is any indicator, but at least the choice left their throngs of horror fans with a terrifying new outing on the horizon.
Bring Her Back hits U.S. theaters May 30. Stay tuned to Collider for more updates.
