Obliterating expectations, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is currently hitting big at the box office, punching its way through records like so many wooden boards, and this is in no small part thanks to the efforts of director Destin Daniel Cretton, who has now revealed that he would return for a sequel. While the filmmaker has been sceptical of working for Marvel Studios in the past, Cretton explains that, now he has gone through the process of making such a big budget blockbuster for the studio, he would not hesitate to do it all over again for Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings 2.
“Yeah, yeah, I would. When I said that to my agent, it was real. I was basically just telling my agent, ‘I don’t want to do those types of movies.’ I know I was getting to the place in my career where it’s easy for agents to try just and push me into that direction, but I was not feeling like I wanted to. A part of it was definitely fear. Fear of losing creative control.”
“Fear of just losing my mind, being on a movie project that big. (laughs) But I found the experience to be much more exciting, much more fun than I expected. And I also found that the process of working on a big movie was more conducive to who I am than I expected. You know, I grew up on an island, so I move at kind of a slower pace than most people. But I also love collaboration. I love collaborating with people who are really good at their jobs. And this movie was extremely collaborative, and I had a blast. So I’d definitely do it again.”
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings chronicles the story of Shang-Chi, a skilled martial artist who was trained at a young age to be an assassin by his father Wenwu. After leaving the nefarious Ten Rings organization and opting to live a normal life in San Francisco, Shang-Chi is soon drawn back into the clandestine world of the Ten Rings and is forced to confront the past he thought he had left behind.
Starring Simu Liu as Shang-Chi alongside Awkwafina, Meng’er Zhang, Fala Chen, Florian Munteanu, Benedict Wong, Michelle Yeoh, and Tony Leung, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings introduces a newly undiscovered world of martial arts and magic into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as well as debuting its version Asian lead, something which ultimately led to Cretton becoming interested in joining the MCU.
While Shang-Chi 2 has not yet been confirmed, the box office results, along with the overwhelmingly positive critical reception, surely make a sequel an inevitability. In fact, Marvel boss Kevin Feige has already teased plans for the character’s return. “The early reactions to the characters and to [the movie] itself gives me great hope that people will want to see more of these characters,” Feige said. “We certainly have many ideas of where to take them and where to put them.
And as exactly as you say, what’s so fun, we know the movie’s working when it’s not just the title character that people ask about, but it is the co-stars or the supporting players that people ask about. And in this movie in particular, that’s heartening because we think they’re spectacular, and we think they have great potential in the future.” Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is out now. This comes to us courtesy of Cinemablend.