‘Ip Man’ B.O. success spurs sequel

IP MAN has been ripping up the Asian box office since its release in December and now producer Raymond Wong has confirmed that the sequel to the period kung fu drama starring Donnie Yen is being fast-tracked into production.

This biopic of famed Wing Chun grandmaster Ip Man shot to number one on its opening week in Hong Kong and has since earned over $2.8 million in three weeks. It has also been performing well in Mainland China and Singapore where it has earned $9.9 million and $1.6 million respectively.

It was previously reported back in November that Mandarin Films was planning a sequel to IP MAN (see Wu-Jing.org) and that an international casting search was being considered to find an actor to portray a teenage Bruce Lee. Ip Man was Lee’s Wing Chun instructor from 1954-’57 in Hong Kong before the martial arts icon came back to the U.S. to attend college.

The sequel is budgeted at HK$40 million and planned for release in 2010. Yen will return to play the title role and longtime collaborator Wilson Yip will return as director. The plot will center on Ip Man’s escape from Japanese occupation of China into Hong Kong.

The success of IP MAN is a boost to not only the Hong Kong film industry but also the martial arts genre. The last kung fu movie to do similarly well was Jet Li’s FEARLESS, which was the territory’s top-grossing film in 2006 with $3.9 million. It scored another $12.8 million in Mainland China. It’s much to the credit of the successful partnership of Wilson Yip and Donnie Yen, which began with KILL ZONE (aka SPL), that a period kung fu movie like IP MAN could do so well without Jet Li, Jackie Chan, Yuen Woo-ping, or Stephen Chow’s name attached.

This suggests that the demand for kung fu action and drama still exists among theater goers, despite the continued saturation of kung fu and wuxia series on Chinese-language television where many genre talents past and present have been residing for years, sadly out of sight of international view outside of occasional English-subtitled DVD releases from Tai Seng.

Regarding the Bruce Lee role, hopefully a young actor with potential beyond this role will be selected. Had this sequel been in the works seven or eight years ago, Philip Ng would have been a perfect choice. Now in his 30s, the actor, action director and Choy Lay Fut master could probably still pull off being a 17-year-old Bruce Lee. If Jackie Chan could play a character half his age in DRUNKEN MASTER 2, so could Ng. It would be especially cool given that Ng has already portrayed Chan Wah-shun, Ip Man’s master in the WING CHUN TV series.

IP MAN has already been picked up for release in the U.K. by Showbox. Likely candidates to carry the title in North America are The Weinstein Company or possibly Universal Studios, the company that carried Jet Li’s FEARLESS. Since Bey Logan joined TWC as Asian Acquisitions head, all of Donnie Yen’s films since KILL ZONE have ended up on the company’s Dragon Dynasty label with the exception of DRAGON TIGER GATE, a fantasy comic-to-film adaptation with limited appeal outside of its targeted Asian audience.

Source: Variety

Tags: Donnie Yen, Ip Man, Ip Man (2008), Ip Man 2 (2010), Mandarin Films, Wilson Yip