![]() ![]() The hero of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings has been living carefree in San Francisco for a decade (in a sly nod to the life of Bruce Lee) when he is drawn back into the nefarious sphere of his villainous dad. Rather than just take on board Cretton’s comments, Marvel hired the Hawaiian-born son of a Japanese-American mother and a father of Irish and Slovakian ancestry to direct the thing. “I honestly thought at best I could maybe, through the process of meeting with them, just explain some of the things that would be offensive to me, and maybe guide it in some way just by getting my voice in someone’s ear.” “I didn’t think I was going to end up getting the gig,” Cretton told BuzzFeed. And it’s no bad thing that Marvel reportedly hired director Destin Daniel Cretton after he offered the studio advice on how to avoid offensive portrayals inherent in the source material. It helps that Leung, one of Hong Kong cinema’s biggest beasts, has signed on to play the Mandarin, giving the project immediate authenticity. And yet it’s also clear that the studio is keen to deliver an authentically Asian-led story, rather than one in which actors of Asian extraction are only wheeled out to play bad guys and cannon fodder. Partly, this is because Marvel no longer has the rights to novelist Sax Rohmer’s pulp villain. Instead of Ben Kingsley as Slattery, we get the inimitable Tony Leung as Wenwu, AKA the real Mandarin, while the even more grossly racist figure of Fu Manchu (who was Shang-Chi’s father in the original, 70s Master of Kung Fu comic-book run) has been wisely banished from sight. And now Marvel has “fixed” its “Asian problem” by announcing Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, the first full trailer for which debuted this week. Race-swapping Rand would have been to depart from the line of the original comic book, but that did not stop the studio casting Tilda Swinton as a “Celtic” take on the traditionally Asian Ancient One in Doctor Strange.Ĭontinuing down this path was never going to wash after Black Panther proved the box-office firepower of a superhero movie populated almost entirely by actors of colour. While only loosely connected to the MCU, Iron Fist fell into the problematic “white saviour” trap by casting Finn Jones as kung-fu-kicking New York rich kid Danny Rand, a stereotypical white guy who beats the Asian martial arts experts at their own game. Then there were the Netflix Marvel TV shows, in particular Iron Fist. ![]() The only problem was that this was another role not going to an actor of east Asian extraction. Keen to avoid a backlash when depicting the traditionally stereotyped Mandarin supervillain in Iron Man 3, the studio cleverly cast part-south Asian actor Ben Kingsley as a drunken English luvvie, Trevor Slattery, who was only ever playing the role of Tony Stark’s evil nemesis. ![]() W hen it comes to Asian superheroes, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has left a lot to be desired. ![]()
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