After breaking racial and gender barriers respectively with Black Panther and the upcoming Captain Marvel, Marvel Studios is taking a swing at a new milestone.
The studio is developing its first movie about an Asian lead hero, Shang-Chi, a character created by Steve Englehart and Jim Starlinin in the ’70s as “The Master of Kung-Fu,” taking advantage of the popularity of the martial arts genre at the time.
The martial arts epic does not yet have a director attached, but is being written by Dave Callaham, who penned the Wonder Woman sequel, Wonder Woman 1984, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
In comic book lore as channeled by the industry trade, the character is “the son of infamous pulp villain Fu Manchu…(who was) trained as a martial artist assassin by his father, only to rebel against him and become a superhero instead.”
The news comes amid a major Hollywood push for more diversity that includes Asian leads, perhaps buoyed by the success of Warner Bros.’s Crazy Rich Asians, which earned a crazy rich $236 million at the box office.
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