Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings filmmakers talk backstory, representation

The first trailer for Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings came out earlier this week, and it kicked ass pretty much right out of the gate.

Shang-Chi (Simu Liu) is a martial arts master and son of Wenwu (Tony Leung), the leader of global terrorist organization the Ten Rings. Trained as an assassin, Shang-Chi opted to live a normal life in San Francisco. We pick up the story when his father has had enough of what he sees as a rebellious streak and calls Shang-Chi home to take up the family business. “This is not a ‘Luke, I am your father’ twist,” Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige told Entertainment Weekly. “He knows who his father is, and he’s decided to leave that world behind before he’s pulled back into it.”

“The core of Shang-Chi’s arc in the comics is really a family drama,” said producer Jonathan Schwartz. “That was something that [director Destin Daniel Cretton] keyed into really early on in our conversations, the idea of taking this broken family and this really dark, even abusive family background and seeing what that does to a child over time.”

How does Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings chance the comic source material?

That said, the movie won’t be completely embracing the character’s comic book origins — the character of Wenwu is entirely invented, in fact. Also, not everything about the early 1970s-era Shang-Chi comics has aged well. “The fact that he existed and the fact that he was an Asian character was amazing,” said Sima Liu. “But at the same time, there are aspects of that portrayal of him that maybe could feel a little stereotypical. So when we first started to map out who this character was and what his journey was going to be over the course of this film, we were all very sensitive to not have it go into stereotypical territory.”

And because Shang-Chi isn’t a hugely popular Marvel character, the filmmakers don’t have to worry about people having preconceived notions about him, freeing them up to get a little creative. “His backstory has never been told before,” Liu said. “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.”

And at the end of the road, we will have a big budget Marvel superhero movie with an Asian lead character at its center, the first of its kind. “[Growing up] all I had was Spider-Man. Because he had the mask on, I could dress up like Spider-Man for Halloween,” said Cretton. “I had a handful of other characters that looked like me on screen, but there were maybe two or three that I could choose from, and superheroes were not a part of that.”

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

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h/t SyFy Wire