More than a decade after becoming one of the most successful foreign language films to hit the U.S., inspiring a brief craze for imported martial arts movies and nearly as many horrible spoof sequences as The Matrix, the 2000 hit Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon is headed to a sequel. The Weinstein Company (which has been all about reliving those turn-of-the-millennium glory days lately) is moving forward on the film, apparently believing it won that years-long legal battle with Crouching Tiger’s original studio Sony over who actually owns the rights to the books that form its source material, written by the late Wang Du Lu.
Provided Harvey Weinstein is not making a bullheaded decision and openly daring someone to challenge him on it (And when has he ever?), he’ll produce the adaptation of the next and final chapter in the Crane Iron Pentalogy—which is called Silver Vase, Iron Knight, though surely the movie title will have to have Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in it somewhere, so we’ll all know to go see it. There’s already a script from The Forbidden Kingdom (and Young Guns!) writer John Fusco, Ronny Yu is in talks to replace Ang Lee as director, and, perhaps most importantly, fight choreographer Wo Ping Yuen is expected to return for more of that often-imitated-since wire work and treetop sword fighting and so forth.
Not clear as of yet is whether Michelle Yeoh or any other Crouching stars are expected to return, even though the Silver book continues to revolve around Yeoh’s character. However, Fusco is already playing up the sequel’s “new generation of star-crossed lovers,” new villains, and even the book series’ alternate universe “martial forest that exists alongside the real world, full of wandering sword fightersm medicine men, defrocked priests, poets, sorcerers and Shaolin renegades,” so the implication seems to be that there will be plenty of other stuff to look at even if they don’t.