Destin Daniel Cretton never wanted to make a Marvel movie. The 42-year-old director has built his career on quiet, introspective dramas such as Short term 12, The Glass Castle, and Just mercy – not exactly your typical superhero spectacle. He remembers telling his friends he didn’t feel like joining the world of capes and comic book heroes – until he read a 2018 news report that Marvel was developing. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, the first film with an Asian protagonist.
“When that announcement came out, I went straight back to my childhood,” explains Cretton.[Growing up] all I had was Spider-Man. Since he was wearing the mask, I was able to dress up as Spider-Man for Halloween. I had a handful of other characters who looked like me on screen, but there were maybe two or three that I could choose from, and superheroes weren’t part of that. “
Cretton – born in Hawaii and of Japanese descent – kept thinking about how his younger self would have reacted to a superhero movie with a predominantly Asian cast. So he made an appointment with Marvel. “That’s not usually the way board meetings start, saying, ‘You know, I was never interested in doing any of these,’” said Kevin Feige, president of Marvel Studios, laughing. That Marvel encounter turned into another, and another, until it wasn’t long before Cretton was in front of thousands of fans at San Diego Comic-Con in 2019, introducing the world to the kind of hero his childhood had only dreamed of. .
The result is Shang-Chi (in theaters September 3), a compelling superhero epic that combines emotional family drama with martial arts that defy gravity. Chinese-Canadian actor Simu Liu stars as the young hero, who spent the early part of his life training to become a hit man under the strict tutelage of his father. He has since run away and tried to build a somewhat normal life in America, but was sucked back into his father’s sinister realm.
“The most exciting thing about entering this character was that his backstory has never been told before,” said Liu. We know so many different versions of Batman’s origin story, how his parents were killed when he was very young. We know Peter Parker, who was bitten by a radioactive spider, and he loses his uncle. The story of Shang-Chi is virtually unknown. for most of the world, so we had a lot of freedom and creative freedom to make it the way we wanted. ”
He may not yet be a household name like his fellow heroes Iron Man or Captain America, but the idea of becoming one Shang-Chi film is older than the Marvel Cinematic Universe itself. Created by Steve Englehart and Jim Starlin, the kung fu master made his comics debut in 1973 as a way for Marvel to capitalize on the popularity of martial arts stories with American audiences. Stan Lee reportedly tried to develop a Shang-Chi movie starring Brandon Lee as early as the 1980s, but the project never materialized. In the early 2000s, then-burgeoning Marvel Studios began putting together a notebook of cartoon characters who could potentially headline their own movies – a notebook featuring Shang-Chi.
Now, after a history of false starts, the martial arts master is finally taking the spotlight.
“The core of Shang-Chi’s arc in the comics is really a family drama,” said producer Jonathan Schwartz. “That was something Destin got into very early on in our conversations, the idea of taking this broken family and this really dark, even violent family background and see what that does to a child over time.”
Bring Shang-Chi in the MCU also meant updating some of its dated origins. The character’s comic backstory has changed over the years, and Cretton and writer Dave Callaham were keen to forgo the racially insensitive clichés of the early songs.
“When you look at Shang-Chi’s character through the comic books that go back to the 1970s and 1980s, the fact that he existed and the fact that he was an Asian character was amazing,” says Liu. But at the same time, there are aspects of that portrayal of him that might feel a little stereotypical. So when we first started mapping out who this character was and what his journey would be in the course of this movie, we were all very sensitive not to let the stereotypical territory invade. “
Cretton says he wanted to tell a story about Asian identity that felt as lived and authentic as possible, of which Shang-Chi had Asian voices both in front and behind the camera.
“Remember that Asian culture is so diverse,” he says. “I grew up in Hawaii, [and] Hawaiian food is like Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hawaiian, Filipino, all mixed together. That’s kind of what our crew was: it’s like this great mix of Asian cultures comes together and responds to the script and [saying things] like, “Oh, that doesn’t feel quite right.” All of that contributed to what I think is a really nice update from what started in the comics a few decades ago. “
“It was a level of Asian representation that I haven’t seen, and I thought it was cool to look as an Asian American,” adds Crazy rich Asians star Awkwafina, who plays Shang-Chi’s close friend Katy. “It certainly explores different levels of identity.”
When it came time to cast the charming hero, Marvel launched a worldwide search for an actor of Chinese descent. They found him in 31-year-old Liu, best known for his role as Jung Kim in the beloved Canadian sitcom Kim’s convenience. The actor had long dreamed of adapting as a superhero – to the point where he was tweeted at Marvel as early as 2014, hoping an Asian-American hero will join the franchise. When Shang-Chi was actually announced, he followed with another tweet: “OK Marvel, are we going to talk or not?
“What definitely didn’t go through my mind was, ‘Hey, I’m going to tweet Marvel and they’ll come back to me, and I’ll get this part,'” he says with a laugh. To his surprise, he even received an invite to audition – and after officially landing the role in July 2019, he was on a plane just days later, bound for San Diego to join Cretton at Comic-Con.
When the movie starts, Shang-Chi (pronounced “song”, not “sang”) in San Francisco is living in a seemingly ordinary twenties. He’s a little directionless and spends most of his time with friends like Awkwafina’s Katy. She is one of his closest confidants, but she doesn’t know much about his history or why he lost contact with his parents. And she’s absolutely unfamiliar with the action-packed world of hitmen and kung fu masters.
“She doesn’t do much of the heavy lifting,” says Awkwafina. “But in the end, she has a real heart, and she has a loyalty and commitment to her friendship with Shang-Chi. She’s super brave.”
Shang-Chi’s current life may seem average, but his past is anything but: his father Wenwu is a powerful old figure who trained his son to follow in his criminal footsteps. It has been about 10 years since Shang-Chi learned of his father’s wrongdoing and walked away. “This isn’t a ‘Luke, I’m your dad’ spin, ” Feige adds. “He knows who his father is, and he’s decided to leave that world before he’s drawn back into it.”
To play the master villain, the filmmakers hired legendary Hong Kong actor Tony Leung, known from films like Wong Kar-wai’s In the mood for love and Chungking Express. “A character like Wenwu could easily have been a one-dimensional villain without a heart,” says Cretton. “Tony opened this character [so] this is an adversary with a deep capacity to love. “Wenwu and Shang-Chi’s on-screen relationship is complicated, but off-camera Leung and Liu became fast friends and bonded with snowboarding.” He’s a huge adrenaline junkie, ”says Liu of his cinematic dad.
Wenwu is a new character created entirely for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He is associated with the Ten Rings, the mysterious terrorist organization first mentioned in 2008 Iron ManAs Schwartz and Feige put it, Wenwu has “used many names” over the decades – and one of those titles is “the Mandarin,” one of Marvel Comics’ most infamous villains. That name surfaced earlier in 2013 Iron Man 3, only for that version of the character (played by Ben Kingsley) to be revealed as a fraud, an unemployed actor named Trevor Slattery. Leung’s Wenwu is something new – and much more dangerous.
“I think people are hearing ‘the Mandarin’ and expecting something very specific, and that may not be what they are getting,” Schwartz teases. “They hopefully take on a more complex and layered take on the character than that name would lead you to.”
Of course, you can’t make a movie about the world’s most skilled fighter without choreographing some pretty elaborate battles. “I think this is the best action [Marvel has] ever done, ”says Schwartz. Every punch makes sense, every fighting style makes sense and the story is told in such a great way visually. As Shang-Chi is a master of different types of martial arts, Cretton drew inspiration from a variety of sources, from the elegant, almost ethereal wushu style of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to the more kinetic choreography of Jackie Chan’s action comedies. Accompanying stunt coordinator Brad Allan was brought in to help unite Shang-Chi’s different styles and expertise.
For Liu, that meant that he threw himself into training: the actor doesn’t joke about that some of his Marvel cohorts, Shang-Chi’s face is never obscured by a mask, so he had to learn to do as many of his own stunts as possible. Almost as soon as he walked off the Comic-Con stage in 2019, he began to practice various forms of martial arts and tried to build up without losing the flexibility and agility of Shang-Chi. “I want to sit here and tell you that I was pretty good at martial arts before,” admits Liu. “I might have worked as a stuntman in Toronto for a few days. But really, my martial arts experience was like backflipping in my backyard when I was a teenager doing parkour with my friends.”
But even with all the high-flying kung fu action, Cretton always wanted to keep Shang-Chi grounded – and making a superhero movie that his younger self would have loved.
“We wanted to make sure Shang-Chi was just like us,” explains Cretton. “I want to watch this movie and say, ‘Yes, that’s how I feel. I feel out of place sometimes, and I cover it with humor.’ He’s a kid out of his element and a fish out of the water here in the US, and he covers it with this charisma that I find very recognizable. ”
This post has been updated every Shang-Chi teaser trailer.