Chinese Superhero Origin Story

I made a brief movie pitch in a tweet:

I thought I should flesh out a treatment so I have something in hand when all the studio heads come beating down my door.

Act 1

Jin is the successful owner of a heavily subsidized solar panel manufacturing plant whose world is changed one day when he refuses to bribe a corrupt government official named Li who tells him “it would be a shame if something happened to all those nice glass solar panels of yours.” In retaliation, Li fires all of Jin’s solar panel inventory into space. He could have just broke them for a lot less money but he’s trying to make a point I guess.

Jin tries to reason with Li and plead his case, using a calm, measured tone and even drawing some diagrams, but this just makes the official madder. He beats the shit out of Jin and stomps his phone to pieces. Jin tries to fight back, especially when Li goes for his phone, but it is to no avail.

Now publicly humiliated, Jin loses the respect of his parents, his girlfriend, and his dog, all of whom leave him. At rock bottom, he decides to go somewhere exotic to rethink his life and find his identity — the United States.

Act 2

Jin arrives in Boston and wonders if he has made a mistake. The culture is primitive and the food is strange. He is befriended by a local cab driver named Ed Spaghetti who introduces him to Boston’s famous gumbo, jambalaya, fried chicken, sourdough, and other weird authentic local dishes, which are a funny experience, but he misses real food.

At first he looks down on the Americans for their atrocious lack of math knowledge and their habit of working only 4 hours a day. But when he and Joe get caught up in a bar fight one day, he watches in awe as Ed pummels the hell out of five guys despite having downed 6 pints in the last hour. Jin realizes he may have a lot to learn from these seemingly simple, harmless folk.

Jin pours out his backstory to Ed Spaghetti in hopes that he can help somehow, and after some reluctance, Ed promises to teach Jin how to barroom brawl. He teaches him how to smash and use a beer bottle as a weapon, where he can usually find a baseball bat or shotgun behind a bar, and how to get other people involved in the fight by yelling lies about your opponent.

Jin gets good really fast, partially because of his willingness to train more than 5 minutes at a time before taking a break to eat Twinkies and skateboard or whatever Americans do in the 20 hours they don’t work. And he brings his own talents to the mix. One day when he and Ed are fighting ten dudes in a biker bar, Ed is crowing over a pile of 9 unconscious bodies when Jin leaps past him over the bar and subdues the last guy going for the shotgun.

“We were fighting 10 dudes,” Jin explains, “and you only took out 9. That means there was one left.” Ed doesn’t understand any of this, and sees Jin as basically a wizard.

But the next night, Jin gets caught off-guard when he is sucker-punched by a guy who “didn’t like his face.” Ed saves him from the guy and his buddies, and explains later that Jin still doesn’t get the true spirit of bar fighting. The problem, says Ed, is that to be a true bar fighter, you have to let go of the idea that you need a good reason to fight someone. You need to be able to fight anybody for a stupid reason, or even no reason at all. That is the true spirit of American bar fighting.

The next day, Jin gets extremely drunk and beats up the entire Harvard crew team because “there are too many top-ranked universities around here, it’s too confusing,” and the rest of the people in the bar, because they’re there. He uses the confusing lies Ed taught him along with his own black magic math skills to play the other fighters against each other until he is the last one standing. He is immediately crowned the greatest bar fighter Boston has ever known.

Now his training is over, and it is time to go back and apply it to real life — that is, China.

Act 3

When Jin comes back home, everyone can see he is different. He is wearing an exotic velour tracksuit, a sign of a man who has mastered another culture and wears its trappings easily. There’s something about his manner too — he seems less calm and more easily provoked.

He confronts Li at his office. Li begins launching into a speech he’s obviously been preparing for months: “Well, well, well. I didn’t think you’d be stupid enough to come crawling back. Have you returned for another hu-” Everybody is surprised when Jin smacks him with a baseball bat. It is a fine piece of work, autographed by Ted Williams, a gift of great honor from the Bostonians whose respect Jin had won.

Li’s bodyguards dive for Jin but he has already started his attacks on them because their shoes were too shiny, landing blows before they can prepare. When the dust clears, and everyone but Jin is lying still on the ground, Jin takes a portrait of Mao off the wall and throws it out the window because he doesn’t like the way Mao is looking at him.

He walks out the door and disappears into the city, becoming a mysterious figure that appears from time to time to wreak havoc in the offices of corrupt officials, and sometimes random people, just to keep them guessing.

Please contact me directly if you want to option this script.