The Weinstein Company is all set to remake a pair of classic Shaw Brothers martial arts movies.
The studio will team up with the folks at Celestial Pictures to update the iconic kung fu flicks Come Drink With Me and The Avenging Eagle. John Fusco, the man responsible for penning the Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon sequel, will handle scripting duties on the projects.
Harvey Weinstein said in a statement :
Shaw Brothers and Sir Run Run Shaw were responsible for ushering some of the first great, legendary Asian filmmakers and acting talent onto the world stage. It’s an exciting opportunity to be bringing new life to these two classic films and taking them into the global market with Celestial Pictures.
Celestial Pictures owns the worldwide rights to the Shaw Brothers catalog, which boasts a whopping 760 motion pictures . The distribution company was responsible for remastering and releasing many of the Chinese studio’s iconic movies on home video over the past few years.
“There is a fan base for these films which we hope to increase [through the remakes]. We’ve always been very careful, but now we’ve finally met the writer who understands the Chinese dynamics of the stories. Their integrity is very important, these are our crown jewels,” Celestial’s Kristen Tong explained.
The Avenging Eagle tells the story of a guy who trains orphans to fight in his gang. Come Drink With Me follows the adventures of several bandits who kidnap a governor’s son in order to free their leader. Both films are considered classics in the genre
The Weinstein Company’s involvement with the remakes is a cause for concern for those who remember how Miramax handled some of Jackie Chan and Jet Li’s Chinese films during the 90s. The company was notorious for releasing butchered, poorly-dubbed versions of the flicks through their Dimension label. Hopefully Weinstein has a bit more appreciation for the genre than he did in the past.
What do you think about The Weinstein Company remaking a pair of Shaw Brothers classics?
[Image via Celestial Pictures]
