Simu Liu is breaking a months-long silence on the Sleeping Dogs film, telling fans the project has real momentum behind it.
The actor and producer posted on X that the adaptation is "moving along really well," the first substantive public word on the project since roughly six months of quiet after director Timo Tjahjanto signed on in December 2025.
The update lands shortly after Liu offered a smaller tease to fans. In late July, replying to a follower who urged him to "do this game justice," he wrote: "Hope to post some really positive updates soon. Stay tuned."
Tjahjanto, the Indonesian filmmaker behind Nobody 2, which hit theaters in summer 2025, was publicly announced by Liu on X with a four-word introduction: "Ladies and gents, the director of sleeping dogs."
Tjahjanto, for his part, responded with equal swagger, posting that the film would require crossing "oceans of time" to get right, and later adding, "This will take time, but we'll make the best version out of it, cleaver, chopsticks n all."
The script had already cleared a key milestone before Tjahjanto came aboard. Liu shared a photo of the screenplay's title page on X in October 2025, captioning it: "In honour of our Sleeping Dogs script draft being done, here's my sleepy dog." Tjahjanto was confirmed as director roughly two months later.
Production company Story Kitchen is backing the project alongside Liu, who stars as Chinese-American undercover cop Wei Shen and also serves as a producer. The adaptation is based on Square Enix's 2012 open-world action game, set in Hong Kong, in which Wei Shen infiltrates the Sun On Yee Triad. Developer United Front Games closed in 2016 without ever releasing a sequel.
The path to this iteration of the film has been anything but smooth. A 2017 version with Donnie Yen attached stalled for years before Yen confirmed it was dead in early 2025, noting he had invested his own money into that effort.
