Shang-Chi Director Shares Advice Black Panther Director Gave Him

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings director Destin Daniel Cretton reveals the advice he received from Black Panther helmer Ryan Coogler. Phase 4 of the MCU kicked off this summer with Black Widow. But things are about to kick into a new gear as Shang-Chi arrives in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Comic book superfans of course know that Shang-Chi first appeared in the pages of Marvel back in 1973 during the so-called Bronze Age of Comic Books. Simu Liu gets the task of bringing the character to life on the big screen, backed up by Awkwafina as Katy, Meng'er Zhang as Xialing, Fala Chen as Jiang Li, Florian Munteanu as Razor Fist, Benedict Wong as Wong, Michelle Yeoh as Jiang Nan and of course Tony Leung as the real Mandarin. Ben Kingsley is also somewhat surprisingly in the cast as Trevor Slattery, the actor who controversially played the fake Mandarin in Iron Man 3.

As Shang-Chi prepares to take its rightful place alongside other major Marvel titles to have been translated as part of the big screen MCU, the film’s director Cretton shared the advice he received from fellow MCU filmmaker Coogler before embarking on his new career journey. Coogler’s words of wisdom for Cretton turned out to be rather touching (via CBR):

"The thing that Ryan said to me, which really eased my mind, was the pressure is hard. It'll be the hardest thing potentially that you have done up to this point, but none of that pressure or complications come from the people you're working with or for."

Shang-Chi is of course the biggest movie Cretton has ever worked on after he launched his career with relatively small films, including a pair of movies starring Captain Marvel’s Brie Larson, 2013’s Short Term 12 and 2017’s The Glass Castle. In 2019 Cretton added to his resume by writing and directing Just Mercy, starring Black Panther’s Michael B. Jordan and again Larson. Cretton’s advice-dispensing MCU friend Coogler can certainly appreciate this career arc as he himself began with the Jordan-starring indie Fruitvale Station before graduating to the big studio film Creed and finally Black Panther itself.

Cretton would definitely do well to heed the advice of Coogler who delivered a major blockbuster when Black Panther grossed $1.3 billion at the worldwide box office. Of course, it would be unrealistic to expect Shang-Chi to achieve Black Panther-like numbers, especially given the complications heaped upon the movie industry by the ongoing COVID pandemic. But Shang-Chi has already triumphed in certain ways, earning a certified fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes while making a star out of lead actor Liu before the film even hits theaters. Certainly, all this must come with some measure of pressure for a filmmaker like Cretton, but perhaps that pressure is really about outside things like fan opinions and not the internal reality of working for Kevin Feige and the rest of the folks at Marvel Studios. Indeed, it’s been remarked that Marvel affords a filmmaker less freedom than working for DC, but the trade-off is that the Marvel machine sets up a director for success much more thoroughly. Coogler certainly seems to appreciate the support system offered by the MCU, and it will be interesting to see if things go as smoothly for Cretton as Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings gets its hearing before audiences.

More: Why Shang-Chi Isn’t Releasing On Disney+ (& How It Hurts Marvel)

Source: CBR