Over the past year or so, Marvel Studios has made it awfully clear that they’re making a big push to improve the level of diversity in the MCU, though so far, we haven’t seen too many signs of how they plan to do this. That being said, we know that they hope to fast-track Shang-Chi, which will be the MCU’s first franchise led by an Asian hero and release on February 12th, 2021.
Chinese-American writer Dave Callahan is on script duties and recent reports say that it’s going to enter production pretty soon. But the one question that’s been on everyone’s mind is who will snag the role of the titular hero? Many, many actors have been linked to the part but today, Marvel finally gave us an answer.
During their Comic-Con panel tonight, the studio revealed that Simu Liu will be the one to bring the character to life. Though he’s far from a household name and mostly has TV credits on his resume, we fully trust Marvel’s casting department by this point.
In a recent interview with IANS, Kevin Feige teased what to expect from Shang-Chi, which is apparently now titled Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. Though he didn’t reveal much, he did say the following:
“I think every movie that we do is a risk. We only want to do movies that people seem to think are risks. Doing the story of an Asian-American hero of Chinese heritage is something that is very intriguing to us. It will be really different and special.”
Of course, it’s not like the super producer would say anything different, but we have no reason to doubt the studio and though Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings may not have as much hype behind it as some of the other Phase 4 projects, we’re still curious to see how it develops from here and will be sure to bring you any further updates that spill out of Comic-Con this weekend. Stay tuned.