If all goes to plan – and since when has that been a certainty of late? – come the end of 2021 we should have had four new Marvel Cinematic Universe movies come our way. If Black Widow is a known quantity (much-delayed from last year) and Spider-Man: No Way Home seems tipped to perhaps send Tom Holland’s web-slinger into some kind of Spider-Verse, we’ll also be introduced to two brand new properties: Eternals, from director Chloé Zhao, and Shang-Chi, in Destin Daniel Cretton’s Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings. Though the latter is currently scheduled for September, so far we hadn’t seen a single frame from Marvel’s all-Asian action epic. But out of nowhere, the trailer has just dropped, teasing a major blockbuster blend of superhero stories and wuxia wire-fu with a stellar cast to boot. Check it out:
Isn’t that exciting, huh? And we don’t just mean that slightly tweaked new Marvel Studios logo. The confident, swaggering trailer teases Simu Liu as a major new presence in the MCU going forward – a mystical martial artist trained to be unkillable. The action looks like a killer blend of hand-to-hand brawls, massive battles, and gravity-defying stunts, bolstered by Awkwafina on full form as Shang-Chi’s friend Katy, with a cast that elsewhere features Michelle Yeoh and Tony Leung.
And for those less well-versed in MCU lore, the notion of the ‘Ten Rings’ stretches way back to the original Iron Man – it was the terrorist organisation that originally kidnapped Tony Stark, and who the legendary actor Trevor Slattery pretended to be affiliated with in Iron Man 3. Expect a greater exploration of who exactly the Ten Rings are and what they want in this one.
There’s so much to be excited about here – the long-awaited arrival of Marvel’s first East Asian hero, a key piece in the Phase 4 puzzle, and a massive new MCU blockbuster to look forward to come the end of summer. Hopefully, we’ll all be sat seeing what Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings has in store for us from 3 September.