Photo: Vanyaland
Another Marvel Studios superhero movie is coming to shake up the lack of diversity on and off the big screen.
The studio is on track to boost ethnic diversity and inclusion in its push to produce Marvel’s first movie franchise with an Asian lead—Shang-Chi, according to Deadline.
Piggybacking off of its approach for Black Panther, Marvel’s goal is to introduce a new superhero with Asian and Asian-American ties and appoint Asian and Asian-American filmmakers to spearhead the project.
Marvel tapped Chinese-American film writer Dave Callaham to compose the screenplay for the Master of Kung Fu’s movie. Meanwhile, the studio is scouting out Asian and Asian American directors aiming to produce an equally successful and historic film.
Sources told Deadline that Callaham is the top choice to bring Shang-Chi’s story to the big screen. He has developed superheroes and franchises and plans to use his experiences as Chinese-American to build the story.
Callaham is currently co-writing the DC and Warner Bros. sequel Wonder Woman 1984 with Patty Jenkins and Geoff Johns while he’s writing Sony’s animated Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse 2.
He has his hand in several other projects, including the initial drafts of Zombieland 2; Amazon’s action comedy series Jean-Claude Van Johnson, which he created and produced; the Netflix dark comedy Jackpot; and the Netflix animated comedy America: The Motion Picture.
Callaham is also the creator of the Expendables franchise and the story for the Legendary’s Godzilla reboot.
Shang-Chi joined the Marvel world in December 1973 as part of the Special Marvel Edition No. 15.
The writers of the comic Steve Englehart and Jim Starlin introduced the hero as the son of evil China-based globalist The Devil’s Doctor in the midst of the martial arts craze and the Enter the Dragon hype, according to The A.V. Club.
The upcoming movie’s script will have a modern take on the hero’s epic to write off common stereotypes used to develop many comic characters from this era.
