Chinese Studio Aims to Revive Bruce Lee Using AI Technology

If you’re a film lover, one of the great things about old classics is that you can always find something to appreciate when you revisit them. If you’re a studio executive, one of the great things about old classics is that you own them and can milk them for every penny their worth. At the Shanghai International Film Festival, several Chinese movie studios announced on Thursday that they would be taking their archive of martial arts classics and AI-ifying them.

The government-backed “Kung Fu Movie Heritage Project 100 Classics AI Revitalization Project” will take all-time great kung fu flicks starring the likes of Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, and Jet Li and give them new (but almost certainly not better) life with the help of AI. Per the Hollywood Reporter, Zhang Pimin, chairman of the China Film Foundation, described the project as an attempt to give films a look that “conforms to contemporary film viewing.”

It’d be one thing if this were simply a restoration project or a technique to upscale the resolution to something that feels more modern, but according to the Hollywood Reporter, it sounds like at least some of the effort will go into fully remaking the films with AI filters atop them. For instance, a trailer for the new AI-ed take on John Woo’s 1986 film A Better Tomorrow was shown off at the festival and reportedly turns its lead Chow Yun-fat into a cyberpunk-looking character. The new take, titled A Better Tomorrow: Cyber Frontier, is being marketed as “the world’s first full-process, AI-produced animated feature film.” Yuck.

The studios invited AI animation companies to get involved in the “revitalization” effort, which will apparently seek to “reshape the visual aesthetics” of films while trying to “pay tribute to the original work,” by putting up a fund of 100 million yuan (about $14 million) to help get the ball rolling.

Other films that will be involved in the project include Bruce Lee’s Fist of Fury (1972), Jackie Chan’s Drunken Master (1978) and Jet Li’s Once Upon a Time in China (1991)—all films that you can watch right now and will find to be every bit as magical and captivating as they were the day they first hit theaters. The stunt work still stands up, and the camera work still slaps. You can find all three of these, and plenty of other martial arts classics, on streaming. If you’re a stickler for image quality, films like Fist of Fury have 4K re-releases available on Blu-ray. Just watch these movies. They don’t need AI sloppification to be relevant.