Donnie Yen has taken to an interview with Polygon to confirm that the Sleeping Dogs movie that was announced in 2017 is officially dead in the water. Sleeping Dogs was released in 2012 as a spiritual successor to the True Crime games, and it allowed players to explore an open-world rendition of Hong Kong.
The game was universally praised and highly enjoyable, scoring great reviews before being ultimately overshadowed by GTA 5 just one year later. In the recent interview, Donnie Yen, who was set to star as protagonist Wei Shen, confirmed that it’s ‘an unfortunate thing’ that the project has failed.
Sleeping Dogs Lie
In the interview with Polygon, Donnie Yen explained:
I spent a lot of time and did a lot of work with these producers, and I even invested some of my own money into obtaining the drafts and some of the rights.
I waited for years. Years. And I really want to do it. I have all these visions in my head, and unfortunately… I don’t know, you know how Hollywood goes, right? I spent many, many years on it. It was an unfortunate thing.
Well, on to better things.
Since being ‘announced’ in 2017, almost nothing was mentioned about the live-action adaptation of Sleeping Dogs. It comes as a surprise that it was canned, and it’s likely someone, somewhere is kicking themselves. Right now, live-action representations of video games are going like gangbusters, soaring up the charts and winning awards worldwide.
The likes of Fallout and The Last of Us are testaments to that fact.
When the news dropped that Donnie Yen would be serving as the frontman in Sleeping Dogs, fans everywhere were slightly confused. After all, Wei Shen was originally played by Will Yun Lee, who served as the voice, face, and motion capture artist for the character – and Lee is also a renowned actor.
Regardless of those creative decisions, the Sleeping Dogs movie will never see the light of day.
Do you wish it had been made? Let us know on the GPlayr forum.
For more GPlayr coverage, check out the news that The Last of Us Part II will require a PSN account on PC