One of the most baffling choices in recent gaming history was the fact that the thoroughly excellent 2012 Square Enix game Sleeping Dogs never got a sequel. Since, then it has been relegated to cult classic status and forever spawning people saying things like “why didn’t Sleeping Dogs get a sequel?”
Now, if actor Simu Liu has anything to say about it, that may be about to change. Maybe. Hopefully. There’s a bit of a strange situation going on here Simu Liu is speaking forcefully about trying to get a Sleeping Dogs movie made with him as the star, seemingly indicating it’s close, while IGN has an inside report that yes, it actually is in production. Here’s Liu on Twitter:
“So few film projects make it from pitch phase to greenlight. Pitching execs who don’t understand the game has been tiring. Everyone’s overwhelming love of Sleeping Dogs here has really given us life!”
He says his goal, which is that he not only wants the movie, but he wants that to inspire the sequel game that everyone has wanted to see for over a decade.
If you have been following this saga for a while, you may know that martial arts star Donnie Yen worked for many, many years trying to make a Sleeping Dogs movie happen, but it was ultimately scrapped, even after Yen invested some of his own money to try to get it made. Now Liu is picking up where he left off, but this public campaign is a bit unusual. The best guess is that Liu is doing this to whip up fan support for the idea (and he has) to reinforce this is a good plan.
Sleeping Dogs
Will Liu have any better luck than Donnie Yen? Yen is probably the best living martial arts actor of our time, but Simu Liu is at present bigger name in terms of being a Marvel star and appearing in big-name films like Barbie. That said, absolutely nothing in Hollywood is a sure thing, and video game adaptations have long languished in development hell for many years. At least we are now in a “actually a lot of game adaptations have done great” phase, between the Sonic movies, The Last of Us, Fallout and a half dozen Netflix animes. So maybe that helps its prospects compared to 2017.
Hopefully Liu can get it done as the goal would be A) a good Sleeping Dogs movie and B) an actual sequel, albeit given how long these things take, that would be well into the 2030s, probably. Square Enix still has the rights (they were not sold to Embracer), but who knows what they want to invest in at this point.
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