Hollywood’s New Kick
From Russell Crowe to Steven Soderbergh, top actors and directors are leaping into the global market for martial-arts movies. Why everybody is kung fu fighting. Forty years after Bruce Lee’s “Fists of Fury” hit U.S. theaters in 1971, martial-arts movies are hitting the A list. The kung fu fix that we used to mainline from Hong Kong—with a little help from Japanese samurai flicks and artless American duds—now is available from a surprising number of countries.
As the world is shrinking, it’s also coming together in its appreciation of kicking, lunging and screaming. Filmmakers in countries like Thailand and Indonesia do just fine feeding their own high-powered local economies—Asia-Pacific box office was up 21% in 2010. But everyone is exporting, too, with an especially covetous eye on China, especially if import restrictions lift. Gareth Evans is a Welshman who directed “The Raid,” an Indonesian action film which features the martial art known as silat. “This genre travels well,” he says “You don’t need to understand a foreign language to understand a martial-arts film.” Sony snapped up the U.S. rights to “The Raid,” one of several new films tailored partly for Western audiences, a generation happily raised on videogame mayhem.
Hollywood also is gearing up with bigger-budget films, with better scripts, more-accomplished directors, and bigger stars than Chuck Norris, Steven Seagal and Jean Claude Van Damme. With international revenues increasingly important, studios are targeting Asia with all kinds of films: “Avatar” and “Inception” were big hits in China. But “Kung Fu Panda 2” broke the opening-weekend record there this summer. It’s not hard to imagine why some of Hollywood’s rich and famous have embraced martial arts. It’s a lifestyle double play: Eastern philosophy plus a hard-core workout. “We’re in more of a fitness-obsessed Hollywood, an extreme-fitness-obsessed Hollywood,” says Colin Geddes, a martial-arts-movie expert and programmer for the Toronto International Film Festival. So Evan Rachel Wood knows tae kwon do. Taylor Lautner and Courtney Cox do karate. Naomi Watts does Brazilian jiu-jitsu.
Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon