The trades reported last year that Liu would star in and executive produce an update of the classic detective tales. She'll portray the granddaughter of the titular Chinese/Hawaiian sleuth. John Woo and Terence Chang will produce the film under their Lion Rock Productions banner.
A number of Charlie Chan serials were produced during the 1930s and 1940s. Swedish thesp Warner Oland first played the character on the big-screen; Sidney Toler, Roland Winters and J. Carrol Naish inherited the role. The aphorism-spouting sleuth's last big-screen outing was 1981's Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen, starring Peter Ustinov. All of the above actors who've portrayed Chan were Caucasian.
Mystery.net claims "Charlie Chan wasn't entirely a fictional creation. The author Earl Derr Biggers fashioned him after a real-life detective in Honolulu named Chang Apana. The character appeared in six novels, the first of which was The House Without a Key, but it was his presence in more than forty movies that Charlie Chan replaced the then-pervasive image of the devious, sinister 'Oriental villain' (such as Fu Manchu) with that of a calm, insightful, and never-failing sleuth who prevailed no matter how clever his adversary, or how much bumbling interference he experienced from one of his several wannabe sons."
