{"id":11366,"date":"2011-11-27T04:11:43","date_gmt":"2011-11-27T04:11:43","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2025-10-15T13:37:11","modified_gmt":"2025-10-15T13:37:11","slug":"hollywood-s-new-kick","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/?p=11366","title":{"rendered":"Hollywood’s New Kick"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u2014with a little help from Japanese samurai flicks and artless American duds\u2014now is available from a surprising number of countries.<\/strong> <\/p>\n

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\u2014Asia-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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/strong> <\/p>\n

Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n