Feature Article

Copying Tiger, Ripping off Dragon

The Straits Times, 5 July 2001

Studios hopes to cash in with not-so-hidden knockoffs.

Hong Kong - It was inevitable that someone would try to replicate the success of Taiwanese director Lee Ang's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon But as film buyers gathered here last week for Hong Kong International Film and Television Market, they gaped at the shamelessness of the efforts to imitate the film.

* In one booth, Golden Sun Film, a small Hong Kong Studio, hawked Flying Dragon, Leaping Tiger, a romantic martial arts epic set in ancient China. Its poster mimics Crouching Tiger. But its director Allan Lim, insisted that "it's a totally different movie." Referring to one of the stars of Crouching Tiger, he said, "Chow Yun Fatt doesn't know how to do gongfu. Our gongfu is more real, like Jet Li's." (With Fan Siu Wong in the movie, there shouldn't be any doubts about the realism of the film's martial arts.)

* Nearby, Hong Kong Producer Joseph Lai promoted Roaring Dragon, Bluffing Tiger, a gongfu flick set in 1946 war-torn China. It's poster has images of four warriors under a puzzling slogan: "When the dragon is roaring, the good cheer; when the tiger is bluffing, the devils return to hell." Lai shrugged off all suggestion that the film was a knockoff. "I've made 20 films with the word dragon in the title," he said. "It's a common name for a Chinese movie. My film has guns in it. Crouching Tiger had only swords and sticks."

But the derivative nature of these films has not stopped American studios from snapping them up. Miramax Films, will distribute Flying Dragon, Leaping Tiger outside Asia. Dede Nickerson, Miramax's Beijing representative, believed that Asia could produce many films that could gross US$10 million to US$20 million each. Owing to the incredible success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which brought in a total revenue of US$208 million in box office - US$127 million in US alone - Hollywood studios are now hungry for Asian films with crossover potential and two projects seem positioned to attract at least some of the audience that flocked to Crouching Tiger.

*Tsui Hark's The Legend of Zu, which is the Hong Kong director's remake(?) of his 1983 film, Zu Warriors from the Magic Mountain, uses special effects to create a vision of warriors soaring above mist-shrouded peaks. It stars Hong Kong actress Cecilia Cheng as well as Zhang Ziyi, the actress who gives Crouching Tiger much of its sizzle. (Let's not forget that Wu Jing is in the movie too.) Miramax will distribute Zu in North Ameria and elsewhere. (It bought the film's rights for US$12.8 million, which is slightly more than Zu's production cost.)

*Zhang also stars in Hero (Assassination of King Qinshi), a US$17-million adventure film by Chinese director Zhang Yimou. The cast of Hero will include Tony Leung Chiu Wai and Maggie Cheung. And for those, like makers of Flying Dragon, who insist on having their gongfu real, it will also feature Jet Li.

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