Shang-Chi: How Recent Comics Influenced Director’s Story

Shang-Chi as a Marvel character first made his debut on the page in 1973 and though he was very popular for that decade and well into the 1980s the character hasn’t had a lot of love on the publishing side of things with only a few short-lived series since the year 2000. With the upcoming film Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings on the horizon though Marvel has had two different ongoing series featuring the character, offering the new filmmakers something to draw on and new readers something to dive into. Speaking in an interview with ComicBook.com, director Destin Daniel Cretton opened up about what they took from the comics for the movie, noting it was mostly a thematic element and less a plot thread.

“We definitely pulled directly the thematic from the comics of a very complicated relationship between a father and a son. And we wanted to inject that with our own experience,” Cretton revealed. “Growing up as an Asian-American in Hawaii and Dave Callaham, growing up as a Chinese-American in the Bay Area… We just wanted to make sure that Shang-Chi felt like our friends, that felt like he was surrounded by characters who felt like our family, and watch him go on a journey that we can fully relate to, so that was the core of our creative hope for this movie.”

ComicBook.com’s Brandon Davis further asked Cretton about the action scenes that he created for the film and stamped onto the MCU, calling them the most unique action in a Marvel movie, to which Cretton offered a humble reply.

“The stamp was not my stamp alone,” Cretton added. “This was the result of a really incredible team that we put together. Our stunt team was led by Brad Allan who came from the camp of the great Jackie Chan and was not only trained there to do great martial arts, but really trained to do storytelling and to do physical storytelling with setups and payoffs and physical gags and jokes and humor. And he also put together an incredible team of choreographers from mainland China and Hong Kong, some of which brought this other really beautiful choreo that you could describe some of these fights scenes as elegant and emotional. And we have a fight scene where two people fall in love by the end of it… and these are all fight scenes that are described in ways that I never thought I could describe a fight scene, and I feel so proud to have them all and be a part of this movie.”

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings hits theaters on September 3.