Sleeping Dogs movie is Donnie Yen's "next challenge"

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He's "aiming to make another breakthrough movie"

(Image credit: Square Enix)

The Sleeping Dogs movie is back on track, and Star Wars: Rogue One actor Donnie Yen is getting ready for his starring role.

Yen has been talking up the live-action adaptation of the open-world action game for years, checking in back in 2018 to share an image of himself as protagonist Wei Shen. His official Instagram account recently shared a video of him warming up for a workout, with a caption that teases his next role.

Yen doesn't say anything about it in the video (he mostly just throws some practice jabs at the camera and stretches out his shoulders), but the caption says he's preparing for his next challenge and "aiming to make another breakthrough movie". The hashtags #sleepingdogs, #actionmovie, #videogames, and #thenameisWeiShen confirm what he's actually talking about and keep Yen from falling prey to the menace of vagueposting.

All we really know about the Sleeping Dogs movie so far is that Yen is fully on board, and thankfully, that's a lot. Yen is a modern master of martial arts cinema; while he's best known outside of China for his role as Force-sensitive warrior-monk Chirrut Îmwe in Rogue One, he's also a prolific director and fight choreographer. That makes him a fantastic pick to play Wei Shen, a loose cannon undercover cop who tears up the Hong Kong underworld in the events of Sleeping Dogs.

The funny thing is that Sleeping Dogs was itself deeply indebted to classic Hong Kong action cinema, as the Vancouver-based developers at United Front Games cribbed liberally from classics like Infernal Affairs and John Woo's heroic bloodshed films. With modern martial arts star Yen leading Sleeping Dogs' cinematic adaptation, the whole thing may come full circle.

See what else you should look forward to in our guide to the upcoming movies of 2020 and beyond.

Connor Sheridan
Connor Sheridan

I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University - though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I've previously been a news intern for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and was formerly a staff writer at GamesRadar.