Sleeping Dogs movie is dead, says action legend Donnie Yen

They say to let sleeping dogs lie, but one sleeping dog has lain down for a bit too long. Donnie Yen’s Sleeping Dogs adaptation is no more, the actor told Polygon this week.

Fans of the 2012 Hong Kong-set action game have been waiting for years for an update on a live-action film adaptation. First announced in 2017, the Sleeping Dogs movie was to star Yen, who rose to international fame in the Ip Man franchise and made a Hollywood splash in Rogue One, as game protagonist Wei Shen. In 2018, Yen said the movie was “in motion,” and at one point, Indonesian gore maestro Timo Tjahjanto (The Night Comes for Us, The Shadow Strays) was in talks to direct.

That would have been quite the appealing combination of talent for an adaptation of a beloved game, but as Yen shared on a Zoom call this week, the project is no longer in the works — at least as far as the Hong Kong legend is concerned.

“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,” Yen said. “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.”

The news likely won’t come as a surprise to fans — the lack of any release date announcement or further information wasn’t promising — but it’s disappointing nonetheless. Sleeping Dogs always seemed like a natural fit for Yen, both as a star and potentially as a director: It’s a martial arts-infused Hong Kong crime thriller clearly inspired by many of Yen’s HK classics, and there are few leading men more skilled at delivering the kind of action you would expect.

It’s not the first Sleeping Dogs project to stall in the development phase, either. A planned sequel and spinoff were both canceled in the 2010s, which means Sleeping Dogs fans will have to settle for the great original game and its many DLC offerings — or some of the terrific movies the game was inspired by.