Jon Valera Built "Street Fighter's" Hurricane Kick Off His Own Competition 720 — and Had the Stunt Team Mine the Games for Combos
- Jon Valera was the stunt coordinator and second unit director on the "Street Fighter" movie.
- He built Ryu's Hurricane Kick off the 720 kick he threw as a competition martial artist.
- He told his stunt team to play the games at home and bring back combos the film could use.
Posted: November 5, 2026
Valera came to "Street Fighter" as a former martial arts champion, and the interview is clearest when he is describing the translation problem at the centre of the job: a move that reads as a signature in a 2D fighting game has to survive being done by a human body, on a set, in a camera frame. Ryu's Hurricane Kick is the example he reaches for — he maps it onto the 720 kick he used to throw in competition, which is the sort of substitution a coordinator makes when the fantasy move and a real technique share a silhouette.
The research method is worth stealing. Rather than working only from storyboards, Valera had his stunt team playing the games at home and bringing combinations back to the floor: "Whatever combos you guys come up with in the game that you're playing, we can use those." Prep on the bar-fight party sequence started in February 2025 in Los Angeles, which is the kind of runway a fight-heavy feature needs when the vocabulary is being invented rather than borrowed.
Different performers got different builds. For Andrew Koji's Ryu, the brief was to protect an existing base rather than overwrite it — "We wanted to make sure he kept that style, the traditional base of Japanese martial arts, in his fighting style." Callina Liang's Chun-Li work runs on wires for the Spinning Bird Kick and the Hazanshu-style aerials. Balrog, played by Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson, got dirty boxing — stepping on the foot, headbutts, a groin punch — which keeps a boxer character legible without turning him into a martial artist.
The wrestlers were handled differently again. Cody Rhodes and Roman Reigns came in with performance habits Valera chose to build around rather than drill out: "sometimes if it was a five-punch combo, they would do the first two punches and then add their own mannerisms before finishing the next three." For the alley fight the instruction was restraint — "we wanted to keep it very grounded, with a little sprinkling of their iconic moves."
Learn more on IMDb: Street Fighter (2026) · Jon Valera
