No one can deny that Dwayne Johnson is a very passionate guy about movie and TV classics. The man is a hard worker and I wouldn’t be surprised if he puts every last drop of his sweat to make every project he’s in the best possible. But, also, one must admit his success ratio is not the highest. From his latest remakes, adaptations or follow-ups, perhaps Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017) has some good ideas, but Baywatch (2017) is just awful. Very very awful. That’s why when rumors started back in 2015 that he was planning on producing and starring a remake for John Carpenter’s classic Big Trouble in Little China (1986) more than one of us threw up our arms.
This week people from Collider were in a conversation with Hiram Garcia, co-CEO of Seven Bucks Productions, the company co-owned by Dwayne Johnson. In it, he admitted they are working on a storyline concept for the new Big Trouble in Little China movie and, what a relieve, the plans are not to do a remake but a follow-up. “You can’t remake a classic like that, so what we’re planning to do is we’re going to continue the story. We’re going to continue the universe of Big Trouble in Little China. Everything that happened in the original exists and is standalone and I think there’s only one person that could ever play Jack Burton, so Dwayne would never try and play that character. So we are just having a lot of fun. We’re actually in a really great space with the story that we’ve cracked. But yeah, no remake. It is a continuation, and we are deep into development on that as well, and I think you’ll start hearing some things about that probably soon”. Those were the words of Garcia. Well, he is right there.
in Big Trouble in Little China (1986), Jack Burton is a truck driver that arrives in Chinatown, San Francisco, and goes to the airport with his Chinese friend Wang Chi to welcome his green-eyed fiancee Miao Yin who is arriving from China. However, she is kidnapped on the arrival by a Chinese street gang and Jack and Wang chase the group. Soon they learn that the powerful evil sorcerer called David Lo Pan, who has been cursed more than two thousand years ago to exist without physical body, needs to marry a woman with green eyes to retrieve his physical body and Miao is the chosen one. Jack and Wang team-up with the lawyer Gracie Law, the bus driver and sorcerer apprentice Egg Shen and their friends and embark in a great adventure in the underground of Chinatown, where they face a world of magicians and magic, monsters and martial arts fighters. Magic, pure magic.
Allegedly, Ashley Miller and Zack Stentz, who co-wrote the screenplays for Thor (2011) and X-Men: First Class (2011), are working on the script for the follow-up. Now, only questions are emerging about this new Big Trouble in Little China project. Will Kurt Russell be back as Jack Burton? Or will Suzee Pai, Kim Cattrall, Dennis Dun or James Hong reprise their roles? And which character will Dwayne Johnson play? Because one can imagine he will be in a pivotal role, and not only a supporting appearance, right? So yeah, probably we’ll start hearing something about it soon. And now they have my interest!
