Exclusive Simu Liu suits up in first look at ShangChi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

Destin Daniel Cretton never wanted to make a Marvel movie. The 42-year-old director built his career on quiet, introspective dramas like Short Term 12, The Glass Castle, and Just Mercy not exactly your typical superhero spectacle. He remembers telling friends that he had no desire to join the world of capes and comic book heroes until he read a 2018 news report that Marvel was developing Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, its first film with an Asian protagonist.

"When that announcement came out, I just went instantly back to my childhood," Cretton explains. "[Growing up] all I had was Spider-Man. Because he had the mask on, I could dress up like Spider-Man for Halloween. I had a handful of other characters that looked like me on screen, but there were maybe two or three that I could choose from, and superheroes were not a part of that."

Cretton who was born in Hawaii and is of Japanese descent kept thinking about how his younger self would've reacted to a superhero movie with a predominantly Asian cast. So, he set a meeting with Marvel. "That's usually not the way director meetings start, by saying, 'You know, I was never interested in doing one of these,'" Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige says with a laugh. That Marvel meeting turned into another, then another, until before long, Cretton was standing in front of thousands of fans at 2019's San Diego Comic-Con, introducing the world to the kind of hero his childhood self had only dreamed of.

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