2020 will be the first film in a decade that so no new film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe hit theaters. It's a dubious distinction that is all the more frustrating because if there's a year we could all use some superhero inspiration, it's this one. However, while we may still have to wait for both Black Widow and Eternals, the MCU marches on, as Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, after closing down for four months, began shooting again over the summer, and now principal photography has been completed and star Simu Liu is thanking everybody involved.
Simu Liu, who will play Shang-Chi in the forthcoming Marvel movie, used Instagram to announce that principal photography on the Marvel movie is officially complete. Liu thanks everybody involved in coming together and making the final, post-pandemic, 13 weeks of filming work. Also, he's got an awesome stunt team hoodie that I really want.
The set of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings apparently performed 40,000 individual COVID-19 tests over the course of the second part of the shoot and was virus-free the entire time. This is great news for this set individually and also for the industry as a whole. We've already seen a couple of movies have to shut down production again after positive tests, but this shows that filming of a major blockbuster movie can be done without having the virus appear.
This is all the more important because there will almost certainly be more filming to be done. No film of this size can get by without reshoots and so we can expect a large crew will need to get together again, even if only briefly, in a few months. But if Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings can go 13 weeks without a positive covid test, it can certainly do it again for a couple more weeks sometime early next year.
Simu Liu says in his Instagram post that the world changed after production on Shang-Chi first shut down and he's certainly right about that. Things changed on a global scale, but among those changes have been massive shifts in movie releases. When Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings started filming earlier this year, it was expected to hit theaters in February of 2021. Now, the film has been pushed off to next July.
Still, while we have to wait a bit longer for the movie, it's nice to see that the actual production was able to do everything within its power to get the job done and that everybody stayed healthy while doing it. This is likely good news for both the new Spider-Man movie and Thor: Love and Thunder which are both getting filming underway.
