Simu Liu Confirms Director and Production Deal Progress for Sleeping Dogs Adaptation
Key takeaways
- Simu Liu confirmed a director, production company, and completed script draft are all in place for the Sleeping Dogs film.
- Director Timo Tjahjanto and production studio Story Kitchen are attached to the project.
- Licensing negotiations with Square Enix are currently ongoing, with no release date set.
Simu Liu broke his silence on the Sleeping Dogs movie this week, telling fans on X/Twitter that the project has secured a director and a production company, and is now deep in licensing negotiations with Square Enix. The update came in response to a fan asking about the film's status, and Liu's reply was notably more detailed than the vague reassurances that have characterized previous check-ins on the project. For a film that has had a turbulent road to production, this feels like genuine momentum.
The Sleeping Dogs movie has been in flux for some time. Donnie Yen was originally attached to lead a separate adaptation, but that version was officially scrapped in early 2025. Liu moved quickly to step into the gap, announcing he would both produce and star in a new take on the material. The 2012 Square Enix and United Front Games title — a Grand Theft Auto-style crime drama set in Hong Kong — has long had a devoted fan base eager to see protagonist Wei Shen brought to life on screen.
Director Timo Tjahjanto, known for Nobody 2 and the action thriller Killers, was confirmed to be helming the project late last year. Story Kitchen, a production company with a track record in video game adaptations, is also involved. Liu additionally confirmed in October 2025 that a full script draft had been completed, meaning the creative groundwork is essentially in place while the business side catches up.
The film is described on the Story Kitchen website as a neo-noir story set in a neon-lit, contemporary Hong Kong, following Wei Shen — an undercover cop caught between his law enforcement obligations and his deep personal loyalty to the Triads he has infiltrated. That premise, with its moral ambiguity and Hong Kong setting, maps closely to the tone of the game that earned an 8.5/10 from critics upon release.
No release date or production window has been announced yet, and the Square Enix dealmaking process could still introduce delays. Liu remains busy outside the project, with a return to the Marvel Cinematic Universe scheduled in Avengers: Doomsday this December and ongoing advocacy for a Shang-Chi sequel. Still, the combination of a completed script, an attached director, and active studio negotiations suggests Sleeping Dogs is closer to green-light territory than it has ever been.
The bigger picture
The Sleeping Dogs adaptation is operating in a crowded and increasingly scrutinized space for video game movies. Story Kitchen, which has fingers in several game-to-screen projects, is betting that Hong Kong crime cinema's global appeal — think Infernal Affairs, which itself became The Departed — gives Sleeping Dogs a built-in cinematic vocabulary that audiences will respond to. With Timo Tjahjanto's hyper-kinetic action sensibility attached, the film could position itself as a more visceral, Asia-rooted counterpart to the glossier Hollywood game adaptations that have dominated recently.
The Square Enix dealmaking stage is worth watching carefully. The publisher has historically been cautious about its IP licensing, and the messy handoff from the Donnie Yen version suggests the rights situation is not straightforward. Rival publishers like Sony's PlayStation Productions have built entire internal pipelines to control adaptation quality, and Square Enix will likely want guarantees around tone and creative fidelity before committing. How Liu's team navigates that negotiation will determine whether the film enters production in 2026 or gets delayed indefinitely.
For gaming audiences, Sleeping Dogs represents something rare: a critically loved game from the early 2010s that never received a sequel, leaving fans with a genuine sense of unfinished business. If the film lands well, it could reignite interest in the IP and potentially pressure Square Enix to revisit a follow-up game — something the publisher has declined to greenlight for over a decade. Liu's personal enthusiasm for Square Enix, which he mentioned explicitly, may also smooth what is often an adversarial licensor-producer dynamic.
We've been following the Sleeping Dogs movie situation since the Donnie Yen version fell apart, and frankly, this update from Simu Liu is the most encouraging sign we've seen. The game holds a special place for a lot of our readers — it came out in a period when open-world crime games were everywhere, and Sleeping Dogs stood apart with its Hong Kong setting and genuinely layered story. The fact that Liu, who clearly knows the source material and is a fan of Square Enix by his own admission, has pushed this forward with real infrastructure — a director, a script, a production company — matters to us. We're not declaring victory for the project, because the dealmaking phase is where things go quiet or collapse. But we thought our readers deserved a clear-eyed look at where things stand rather than just a headline that says everything is fine.
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