“You Know How Hollywood Goes, Right?” Donnie Yen Closes The Door On Sleeping Dogs Movie

Mismatched Couples star Donnie Yen shares another unfortunate update to the long-awaited Sleeping Dogs film adaptation.

As we reported last September 2024, action film director Timo Tjahjanto revealed that he got on board the long awaited film, with Donnie Yen tapped to star. As reported by Polygon, the star of Holy Virgin vs. the Evil Dead has shared his own update.

Donnie Yen said this:

“I spent a lot of time and did a lot of work with these producers, and I even invested some of my own money into obtaining the drafts and some of the rights.

I waited for years. Years. And I really want to do it. I have all these visions in my head, and unfortunately… I don’t know, you know how Hollywood goes, right? I spent many, many years on it. It was an unfortunate thing.

Well, on to better things.”

Donnie Yen certainly isn’t lacking for work. His latest feature, the Chinese language action film The Prosecutor, is releasing this week. Donnie debuted in Hollywood in the 2000 film Highlander: Endgame, and his latest Hollywood flick will be a John Wick spinoff featuring his character, Caine.

It goes without saying but this film, even if it would have been produced at a modest budget compared to today’s big superhero films, had huge potential. Sleeping Dogs is itself inspired by the same Hong Kong crime action movies that Donnie Yen starred in, like 1992’s Cheetah on Fire.

One could certainly argue the heyday for these films to make it in Hollywood was in the 2000s, when Jet Li was making movies with DMX and Bob Hoskins. Donnie himself was around at the time for 2003’s Shanghai Knights. But the window could have been reopened with John Wick, Bob Odenkirk’s 2021 film Nobody, and Aaron Pierre’s Rebel Ridge.

Awkwardly enough, Sleeping Dogs’ current owner is Square Enix, a company that is itself having to cut back on risk taking and now moving towards a broader multiplatform direction for all their projects. Square Enix is unlikely to greenlight any new Sleeping Dogs project at the moment, whether that’s a video game or an adaptation to film or as a series.

Sleeping Dogs received a remastered edition in 2014 for PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4, and more remasters are the franchise’s most likely future. At least we could look forward to the game eventually debuting on a Nintendo platform on the Switch 2, but for now, this seems to be the end.