By In unexpected news, Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson are in talks to star in a second sequel to their 2000 western buddy comedy Shanghai Noon. The film will be directed by Jared Hess, best known for Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre. His latest film, Masterminds, comes out at the end of September.
Shanghai Noon (2000) and Shanghai Knights (2003) are Chan’s best American-made movies. A lot of that has to do with his chemistry with Wilson and the cornball tone that played to the strengths of the duo. The Rush Hour films are bland by comparison–quintessentially Brett Ratner and generally devoid of personality despite Chris Tucker and Chan playing off each other well. The Shanghai films are chock full of slapstick and silliness like many of Chan’s 80s and 90s Hong Kong work, so Hess seems like a good fit for the project.
No details yet on the film’s plot or title, though story credits go to Miles Millar and Alfred Gough (writers on the first two films), with the actual screenplay written by Theodore Riley and Aaron Buchsbaum.
While this has no bearing on anything, I remember covering a press junket for Shanghai Knights as a college journalist way back when (I am old). Knights director David Dobkin joked that he’d have liked a third film in the series (Shanghai Dawn?) to take place during World War I. Since Chan and Wilson can basically do a kind of roving Abbott and Costello/Crosby and Hope thing with their characters, I wonder if we’ll see something along those lines.
[via THR]