HN Entertainment can now confirm that a portion of the filming on Marvel’s upcoming Shang-Chi & The Legend of The Ten Rings will take place stateside in San Francisco, California.

We already know that Shang-Chi under the working title of Steamboat (first reported by HN) is set to shoot at Fox Studios Australia in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia for most of the production.

Director Destin Daniel Cretton (Just Mercy) will be directing from a script penned by Dave Callaham (The Expendables, Wonder Woman 1984, Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse 2).

The cast so far includes Canadian actor Simu Liu as Shang-Chi, Tony Leung as the real version of The Mandarin, Awkwafina (The Farwell, Crazy Rich Asians) playing the female lead, and possibly Michelle Yeoh (Crazy Rich Asians, Sunshine, Last Christmas) taking a role as well.

Northern California has been a hot-bed for big studio productions lately with Ant-Man, Venom, Ant-Man & The Wasp, and most recently with Keanu Reeves’ Matrix 4.

There are expectations that Venom 2 and Ant-Man 3 will also return to the area.

This next part is more speculation.

San Francisco is an interesting location in Marvel Comics, while it might be best known as the homestead of the characters of the Ant-Man franchise it also has a deeper connection to another team as it happens to be where the Atlas Foundation aka Atlas Empire has their headquarters underneath the city called the Temple of Atlas.

Leadership in the origination is handed down to descendants of Genghis Khan and The Mandarin happens to claim in the comic books that Khan is his ancestor, one of his aliases happens to be Gene Khan.

Khan was also directly referred to by Ten Rings member Raza in the original Iron Man and having The Ten Rings connected to Atlas would explain how they’ve been able to operate under the radar for so long.

In the original Ant-Man, which was set in San Francisco we saw a member of The Ten Rings with a neck tattoo of the terrorist group’s emblem.

Interesting enough, we’ve already had teases about Atlas with the introduction of Randall Park’s FBI Agent Jimmy Woo (will be returning in WandaVision), who eventually becomes the leader of the Agents of Atlas and runs the Atlas Foundation.

Shang-Chi just happens to be a member of a new Asian-centric lineup of the Agents of Atlas alongside Woo recently put together in the comics.

It’s currently unknown if these San Francisco scenes will connect Shang-Chi to the Atlas Foundation or Peyton Reed’s Ant-Man 3 (confirmed to shoot next year).

However, the city is also the home to the oldest Chinatowns in the United States and might be an entry point to how Shang-Chi is connected to America. One of the best uses of the iconic Chinatown location was in John Carpenter’s iconic cult-classic 1986 action-comedy Big Trouble In Little China starring Kurt Russell and Dennis Dun.

Shang-Chi is well known to be a homage to the legendary Bruce Lee and Lee just happened to have a opened a martial arts school The Jun Fan Gung Fu Institute located in Oakland, California in the early 1960s. It was one of the central locations used in the recent film Birth of The Dragon.

HN Entertainment first revealed that Clive Reston is expected to make an appearance in the film and could lead to his outfit Freelance Restorations making their own MCU debut.

Shang-Chi & The Legend of The Ten Rings is set to be released on February 12th, 2021.

SOURCE: HN ENTERTAINMENT