Looks like we're getting six more weeks of, uh, summer? Marvel star Simu Liu has seen his shadow and returned for his bi-annual Sleeping Dogs movie update. After telling fans (in the form of a random guy on X) that he was still working on translating United Front Games' magnum opus to the silver screen, he's returned to tell us the draft of its script is officially complete.
The momentous news came, appropriately enough, alongside a shot of Liu and his own sleepy dog, though the shot of the script itself had the writer's name cunningly edited out.
It's been a bit of a rollercoaster ride for this project, based on—if you've somehow forgotten—2012's open world crime game of the year. The film was originally announced back in 2017, with Donnie Yen set to star. Then things went quiet until Yen himself said it had been canned earlier this year. That's when Liu entered to take up the banner.
The rights to Sleeping Dogs belong to the game's publisher, Square Enix. You might reasonably think, with Square Enix being kind of weird about its properties in general, that it might bear some responsibility for the movie's rocky road so far. Liu says that's not the case, though. "[Square Enix is] absolutely great it’s the [film] studios that don’t seem to understand how important this IP is," Liu told curious interlocutors, "BUT we will get them there."
I have to admit, I dunno that I can really blame the movie studios here. I'm a Sleeping Dogs sicko—I 100%ed the game on my Steam Deck over Christmas—but I'm not sure even I could contort a way to call the rights to the series "important" in the year of our Lord 2025. It was a great game that deserved a sequel it never got. If that doesn't carry much cachet in the games industry these days, I don't see why it would in the movie industry.
in honour of our sleeping dogs script draft being done, here’s my sleepy dog 👍 pic.twitter.com/l1KsFNDj5VOctober 18, 2025
Who knows? Liu seems incredibly determined, and if he pulls off a film maybe he'll also manage to pull off the sequel game he's been fantasising about, too. The mooted sequel set in China's Pearl River Delta is an all-timer videogame white whale for me. If Liu can get it done, he'll have my undying loyalty.
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