The Sleeping Dogs movie is dead, says star Donnie Yen
They say we should let sleeping dogs lie, but one sleeping dog lay down a little too long. By Donnie Yen Sleeping dogs There is no more adjustment, the actor told Polygon this week.
Fans of the 2012 action game set in Hong Kong have been waiting for years for an update to a live-action film adaptation. First Announced 2017the Sleeping dogs film would star Yen, who rose to international fame in the Ip Man franchise and made a Hollywood splash Villain oneas protagonist Wei Shen. In 2018, Yen said the film was ‘in motion’ and at one point the Indonesian gore maestro Timo Tjahjanto (The night comes for us, The shadow gets lost) was in conversations to lead.
That would have been a pretty compelling combination of talent for an adaptation of a beloved game, but as Yen shared on a Zoom call this week, the project is no longer in the works – at least as far as the Hong Kong legend is concerned.
“I spent a lot of time and did a lot of work with these producers, and I even invested some of my own money in getting the concepts and some of the rights,” Yen said. “I’ve been waiting for years. Years. And I really want to do it. I have all these visions in my head, and unfortunately… I don’t know, you know how Hollywood goes, right? I spent many, many years on it. It was an unfortunate thing.
“Well, on to better things.”
The news probably won’t come as a surprise to fans – the lack of a release date announcement or further information wasn’t promising – but it’s disappointing nonetheless. Sleeping dogs always seemed like a natural fit for Yen, both as a star and potentially as a director: it’s a martial arts-infused Hong Kong crime thriller, clearly inspired by many of Yen’s HK classics, and few leading men are better at delivering the kind of action you would expect.
It’s not the first Sleeping dogs project gets stuck in the development phase. A planned sequel and a spin-off were both canceled in the 2010s, which means Sleeping dogs fans will have to make do with the great original game and its many DLC offerings – or some of the great films that inspired the game.