Jackie Chan’s film career appeared to be in dire straits until a sequel to a popular Bruce Lee movie saved it. Here’s what it was and what happened.A sequel to a Bruce Lee movie revived Jackie Chan’s acting career in the 1970s. Years before becoming one of the biggest kung fu movie stars, Chan had his fair share of struggles in his attempts to make a name for himself. It wasn’t until the late 1970s that Chan’s career really took off in Hong Kong.
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Long before securing his reputation as Hong Kong’s biggest martial arts actor, Chan was a stuntman who worked for Golden Harvest, the studio that made Bruce Lee’s movies. After doing stuntwork and playing extras in over a dozen films in the early 1970s (including Lee’s Enter the Dragon), Chan transitioned toward becoming a lead actor. He starred in a movie called Little Tiger of Canton and also landed the
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lead role in John Woo’s Hand of Death of movie. However, Chan was still a long way from being a star at that point in his life.In his autobiography, Never Grow Up, Chan explained that his career had taken a huge blow with Hand of Death, which didn’t do well at the box office.
He claimed that the industry was still “limping” after Lee’s death in 1973 and that Golden Harvest was forced to cancel several
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of its upcoming movies. Feeling “utterly defeated” by the lack of acting opportunities in his future, Chan got a job as a construction worker. In the same year, things took a turn for Chan when he was contacted about playing the lead role in New Fist of Fury. Marketed as a sequel to Bruce Lee’s second kung fu movie, 1971’s Fist of Fury, the movie was helmed by Lo Wei, the director behind the original film.Five years after directing Fist of Fury,
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Lo Wei decided to revisit the film by bringing back a large portion of the cast and crew, including the female lead, Nora Miao. Since Lee’s character, Chen Zhen, died at the end of the original movie, Lo was able to put the focus on a new martial arts hero whom Chan was picked to portray. Though Chan wasn’t playing Chen Zhen, the plan was still for him to be a Bruce Lee-esque character, who used the fighting style of the late actor.
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He also embarked on a patriotic journey not unlike the one Chen Zhen was sent on in Fist of Fury.
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Of course, it took a lot more than a sequel to a Bruce Lee classic to make Jackie Chan a star. But, making the movie revived his career and at least put him on the path toward stardom in Hong Kong. For a time, Golden Harvest continued what New Fist of Fury started by working to mold Chan into the next Bruce Lee. However, none of the movies he made with that formula took off quite in the way they had hoped. It wasn’t until Drunken Master and Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow, both released in 1978, that Chan finally found his groove as an actor. As it turned out, leaving behind Bruce Lee’s image and taking a more comedic approach to his acting style were what his movies really needed.
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