Vidyut Jammwal is preparing for his Hollywood debut with Street Fighter, and he arrives with a pointed argument about why action cinema from Los Angeles can look so different from action cinema out of Mumbai. It is not, he says, a shortage of skill in India.
The gap is scheduling, not craft
In an interview with PTI, Jammwal said Indian and Hollywood productions draw from the same pool of international technicians. The real difference, he argued, is schedule: a sequence an Indian production may shoot in ten days, a Hollywood production can take four months to refine.
“The liberty of time, the luxury of spending too much time to create something is what they have that we don’t normally use,” he said.
He pointed to S.S. Rajamouli’s Baahubali films as the domestic proof. Because those films were allowed to take their time, he said, the results were visible on screen. The observation matters for Hindi cinema because it shifts the conversation from talent to production economics: the question is not whether Indian crews can execute spectacle, but whether schedules and budgets let them.
Jammwal’s own filmography — Force, the Commando franchise, and Khuda Hafiz — has been built on practical action. That background makes the comparison concrete: he has worked with international action technicians on Indian productions, so he is describing the same crews from both ends of the schedule.
What Street Fighter demanded
Jammwal plays Dhalsim, the yogi who fights with fire, in Kitao Sakurai’s live-action adaptation. The film is set in 1993 and follows estranged fighters Ryu (Andrew Koji) and Ken (Noah Centineo), recruited by Chun-Li (Callina Liang) for the World Warrior Tournament. A conspiracy forces them to confront each other and their pasts.
- Release: October 16 in India
- Languages: English, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu
- Cast: Andrew Koji, Noah Centineo, Jason Momoa, Callina Liang, Vidyut Jammwal and others
- Director: Kitao Sakurai
Jammwal said he did not grow up playing the video game and leaned on the director’s vision for Dhalsim. Trained in Kalaripayattu, he said the character required him to play himself more than to build a new skill set. The production itself felt different: things were, in his words, “very well planned,” to the point that even his habit of rollerblading back to the hotel drew a caution from the legal team.
After the debut
He names Amitabh Bachchan, Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee as his action icons, a lineage that connects Hindi cinema’s stunt tradition to Hong Kong and Hollywood. That lineage also explains why the scheduling gap matters: Indian action cinema has never lacked performers or visual ideas, but it has often been pushed to do more in fewer shooting days.
Jammwal framed Street Fighter as another step in a career built on action, not a planned westward move. He said the director reached out after researching his body of work, and the role felt author-backed. He also confirmed that an action film with Tiger Shroff is in development, with the two actors searching for a director who can raise the bar.
For Hindi cinema, his argument is also a benchmark. If the same technicians serve both industries, then the next leap in Indian action spectacle may depend less on importing talent than on financing time.
Source: Daily Excelsior
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