On the occasion of actor Simu Liu's birthday, Marvel Studios dropped the teaser for Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. The Marvel movie marks the studio's first project with an Asian in the lead.
The movie stars Simu in the titular role while Awkwafina plays his best friend Katy. Tony Leung plays Wenwu/The Mandarin, Shang-Chi's father and the leader of the Ten Rings. It also stars Michelle Yeoh as Jiang Nan, as well as Fala Chen, Meng'er Zhang, Florian Munteanu and Ronny Chieng.
As per the description shared by Marvel on their website, "Shang-Chi and The Legend of The Ten Rings stars Simu Liu as Shang-Chi, who must confront the past he thought he left behind when he is drawn into the web of the mysterious Ten Rings organization."
Speaking with Entertainment Weekly, Liu said that the most exciting thing about the character is that his backstory has never been explored 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," he said.
"The core of Shang-Chi's arc in the comics is really a family drama. That was something that Destin 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," producer Jonathan Schwartz added. —CBR