Well Go USA have released the first official English-dub trailer for The Kung Fu Kid (which, if you remember, was originally titled I Am What I Am 2 and was meant to be a sequel to Sun Haipeng’s 2021 lion-dance drama). And if you’re getting major deja vu, you’re not alone. The first look feels oddly familiar, and that’s probably because it feels like it’s running the exact same playbook as Jaden Smith’s 2010 Karate Kid reboot (you know, the one that’s actually not about karate at all?).
Honestly, the parallels between The Kung Fu Kid and 2010’s The Karate Kid are hard to miss. Dre Parker was dragged to Beijing by his mom’s job relocation. The Kung Fu Kid‘s hero (A Juan, aka Liu Jiajuan) moves to Shanghai in order to find work to cover his sick father’s medical bills. Both are outsiders getting steamrolled in a city that doesn’t care about them. Both get scooped up by a broken-down mentor figure with unresolved trauma. Mr. Han had his dead wife and son. Here it’s Zhang Wate, a fighter who lost an eye (and his confidence) to the film’s antagonist. Both blend “outdated” traditional fighting technique with something more modern to survive a high-stakes tournament against a corporate-backed villain’s prized fighter. Heck, even the closing line in The Kung Fu Kid trailer (“time to teach him what real kung fu is about”) could’ve been lifted straight from The Karate Kid.
The only major difference really is that The Kung Fu Kid is actually a kung-fu flick, whereas The Karate Kid was a kung-fu movie pretending to be a karate movie — a bit of franchise sleight-of-hand we’re still not over. But to be fair, the DNA is similar because that’s how underdog-tournament-kung-fu-movie stories tend to go. It’s not really a rip-off of Sony’s flick. And it’s actually won a ton of awards in China, including a 17th Time Awards top-ten finish, a Golden Monkey Award, and a Golden Rooster nomination.
Where the “fake TEMU Karate Kid” read genuinely makes sense is the trailer cut itself. That shouty ring-announcer energy, the “you’d be lucky to last three seconds” trash talk, the training-montage shorthand is all meant to sell the film to an English-speaking, Karate Kid-adjacent audience. Whether that’s shrewd marketing or a genuine coincidence of genre convention is the real story here.
The Kung Fu Kid punches its way onto digital on August 11 via Well Go USA, with Blu-ray/DVD following September 15.
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