There are two original Marvel Studios movies that are shrouded in mystery: Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and Eternals. Both movies will introduce MCU heroes we haven’t yet seen on screen. And both movies have held off on sharing any sort of official marketing materials, despite the fact that they are opening up this year (after months of pandemic-related release delays). Well, Simu Liu celebrated his birthday today with the first official poster of his martial arts expert Shang-Chi, and then Marvel Studios surprised him by dropping the above trailer!
The good thing about Shang-Chi as a character is that he has had many different looks over the years in the comic books, and he’s not married to a costume the way that Iron Man, Captain America or Spider-Man would be. This means that Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings costume designer Kym Barrett (Aquaman, Cloud Atlas) could get experimental and come up with a design that fit best for what they are trying to create in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Having that freedom is what appealed to Shang-Chi star Simu Liu, who opened up to EW.com and told them:
The most exciting thing about stepping into this character was that his backstory has never been told before. We know so many different versions of Batman's origin story, how his parents were murdered when he was very young. We know Peter Parker, who was bitten by a radioactive spider, and he loses his uncle. Shang-Chi's story is very much unknown to most of the world, so we had a lot of freedom and creative liberty to make it the way that we wanted to.
But thanks to the trailer, it was amazing to finally see the character of Shang-Chi in action. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings appears to be Marvel’s foray into the world of Martial Arts on screen, and we’re also about to see a fantasy movie that embraces fighting styles and weaves them into a mythology in Mortal Kombat. That team argues that it’s more of a martial-arts film than a video game adaptation, and it’s essentially true. How will Marvel adapt the fighting styles of the characters from Shang-Chi into a comic-book movie? How different will this film feel to the rest of the MCU?
After all of the release-date shuffling, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is dropping into theaters on September 3, and will be the second MCU movie of 2021 after Black Widow finally gets to shine. The movie is directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, and co-stars Michelle Yeoh, Awkwafina, Florian Munteanu, and Tony Leung. What did you guys think about the trailer? It definitely caught Simu Liu off guard, and his reaction was priceless. We share your enthusiasm, sir. Time to go watch this trailer a few dozen times back to back!
