The 1994 Street Fighter Movie Is Still Making Money 30 Years Later
Do you remember the live-action Street Fighter film from 1994? Well, in 2024 the film is still making Capcom “tens of millions of yen” every year according to data from a recent shareholder’s meeting.
Released in 1994, the live-action Street Fighter movie was a campy and colorful loose adaption of Street Fighter II. It starred Jean-Claude Van Damme as Guile and Raul Julia as M. Bison. This was famously Julia’s final film role before he died in October of that year, shortly before the film’s release. While it is sometimes referred to today as a cult classic, it should be noted that the adaption of Capcom’s popular fighting game franchise was a box office hit in 1994, making nearly $100 million on a reported budget of $35 million. And apparently, it’s still making Capcom money all these years later.
As first reported by Automaton Media on June 24, according to an individual who attended Capcom’s June 20 shareholder’s meeting, the Monster Hunter and Resident Evil publisher is still making “tens of millions of yen” from the 1994 live-action Street Fighter film every year. I’m not sure why Capcom decided to include this odd bit of information in its important meeting with investors and stockholders, but here we are.
Before you go running off to tell people Capcom is still making heaps of money off of its not-so-great Street Fighter movie, let’s translate just what “tens of millions of yen” actually means. It could mean that Capcom is making as little as $70,000 or as much as $590,000 a year from the Street Fighter movie. I’d probably say it’s somewhere in the middle of that range, so around $300,000. It’s not enough money to fund the next Resident Evil game or anything wild like that, but hey, it might be enough to pay for a few employee salaries.
Now that I think about it, I get why Capcom is bragging. If I made something terrible in the ‘90s and could still get a few thousand dollars for it every year for decades, I’d be pretty damn stoked, too.
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