Some things were always meant to be partners. Batman and Robin. Chocolate and peanut butter. New Marvel movies and beautifully rendered 12-inch action figures of their stars, courtesy of Hong Kong-based toymakers Hot Toys. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings’ Simu Liu and Tony Leung are the latest beneficiaries of Hot Toys’ magic and you can behold them in all their glory here.
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Shang-Chi comes with two different bo staffs, which I presume is because he uses two separate bo staffs in the movie. I wonder what the difference between them will be?
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Extreme posability is needed to replicate Shang-Chi’s full arsenal of martial arts moves.
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The details and texture of Shang-Chi’s shirt/short-sleeved jacket/whatever are simply incredible. Somehow, the hair is even better.
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As you can see, not all of the Shang-Chi figure’s accessories have been revealed yet. These are presumably hidden because they’d spoil something in the movie, but it seems incredibly likely that some if not all of them will be the mystic, yellow energy blasts he creates when he’s wielding (some of) the legendary rings during the fight with his father Wenwu, as very briefly seen in all of the trailers. But if that’s the case, why hide them?
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Notice the eerie glow the rings on Wenwu’s arms seem to have? According to Hot Toys, they’re “specially painted with luminous reflective effect.” It’s a genuinely impressive recreation of the CG-generated aura seen in the trailers.
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And this is why it seems so likely that some of Shang-Chi’s missing accessories will be yellow energy blasts. Wenwu actually comes with several different versions of his mystic ring attacks, which you can see if you keep scrolling.
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Although this is his first big American film, Tony Leung is one of the best-known, most acclaimed actors in the world. He’s especially renowned for how much acting he can do simply with his eyes, something that should be absolutely impossible to recreate in toy form. That Hot Toys managed to capture even a fraction of his soulfulness is, frankly, incredible.
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If I’m right about Shang-Chi’s ring accessories, I suspect he’ll come with a yellow version of the “energy chain” that Wenwu is wielding in the middle-left picture. They may even connect together, as they do in the trailers.
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Here’s the one weird thing about Hot Toys toys: While the face sculpts are so accurate that people (mostly me) have speculated that dark magic is involved, they’re sculpted with completely neutral expressions. That’s fine most of the time because they’re made as collector’s items, not toys to be played with. But if you want to pose two figures together in, say, a fight scene, it’s incredibly odd to see two people who are supposed to be in some sort of emotional state have completely blank looks on their faces. Shang-Chi and Wenwu’s bodies and limbs are in the fight of their lives, but their heads are wondering what’s for dinner.
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