"The Birth of Bruce Lee" Movie Coming Soon

A new $31 million film titled The Birth of Bruce Lee is being co-produced by companies in China and the United States. Despite the title, the film doesn't deal with Bruce Lee's childhood or early years. Instead, the feature focuses on Bruce Lee's infamous mid-1960's fight with Wong Jack Man in San Francisco's Chinatown. The fight was dramatized once already in a highly-fictionalized manner in the movie Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story.

                                                       (Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon)


In real life, the challenge fight did not go as easy as Bruce Lee had hoped. The aftermath led Lee to change his philosophical approach to fighting and, more importantly, seek to publicize his new attitude towards fighting in the then-burgeoning martial arts magazine industry.

Lee would discard traditional kung fu systems and focus on his own personal non-classical art of Jeet Kune Do, the Way of the Intercepting Fist. (Non-martial arts fans should check out the Longstreet TV episode with Bruce Lee to learn more about JKD and Lee's fighting philosophy)

Classic Kung Fu Cinema

Bruce Lee's films might not be deemed classics by 'high brow' cinema scholars. Fans of popular culture and action cinema know Bruce Lee firmly established the growing martial arts movie sub-genre outside of Asia.

1971 saw the release of the Shaw Bros.' "Five Fingers of Death" into grindhouse theaters in the United States. This was the first "kung fu movie" to get any distribution in North America. Scores of such films had been produced in Hong Kong for years. Japan had produced a number of sword-fighting films. Although karate and kung fu was being featured in TV shows and movies, no one picked up any of these foreign films for release.

Eventually, Warner Bros. felt there there was decent financial potential in Hong Kong fight films and delivered Five Fingers of Death in limited release in 1972 and onto wider release in early 1973. The hunch turned out to be right. Five Fingers of Death turned out to be a hit.

                                 (Old-time grindhouse style trailer for Five Fingers of Death)

Summer 1973 saw Warner Bros. open "Enter the Dragon" to massive success. Bruce Lee's earlier films, made in Hong Kong in 1971 and 1972, were released in the United States in 1973 to huge box office success.

National General Pictures (The odd distribution company that brought the world Lee Marvin's Prime Cut (1972), John Wayne's Big Jake (1971) and Snoopy Come Home (1972) held the distribution rights to Fists of Fury and The Chinese Connection and released a massively successful double-feature. Reportedly, the double-feature pulled in $50 million in ticket sales....hard not to believe, the double-feature played in 2nd run theaters and drive-ins for several years.

(National General Pictures was long gone, but the double-feature lived on. Columbia Pictures continued to release the two films in theaters as late as 1981)

No word on the release date for the new biopic. As with Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story and Ip Man, The Birth of Bruce Lee is sure to be more fiction than fact.