In January, RZA dropped a bombshell on me that he was writing a sequel to The Man with the Iron Fists, though not returning to direct. Today I had a chance to interview RZA for Brick Mansions, the parkour thriller opening April 25. We’ll bring you the full RZA interview later this month, but I wanted to confirm that the character he played, the Blacksmith, the Man with the Iron Fists himself, would reappear in the sequel. In his own unique way, RZA confirmed he will return to the role, without specifying how large a role he has.
“Yeah, he [The Blacksmith] came back a little bit,” RZA said.
The Man with the Iron Fists was not a smash, and Universal Pictures has several franchises they continue in straight to video sequels like Death Race and The Scorpion King. RZA wasn’t sure whether The Man with the Iron Fists 2: Sting of the Scorpion would join the DTV slate or go theatrical again.
“I think the quality of it is going to determine it,” RZA said. “I think they’ll look at it and they’ll figure it out. The plan was always to do a few of these. The plan was to franchise the character, to franchise that world. We wrote so much story about it, even now there’s a whole bunch of saga of it, of great scenes that nobody will ever see, or they will see, depending. I wrote so much about this character. Remember, this is a long dream character.”
Even on the first Iron Fists, I joked: how does the Blacksmith wipe his butt with iron fists? RZA laughed when I asked if the sequel would give us an answer, and said he is pitching a line in the script that may be too edgy for the final cut.
“We talked about that. There’s one joke, because he was so morbid on the first one, there’s a scene where he’s captured and he says, ‘Excuse me, you. Come here, can you scratch my balls?’ I think it’d be a good joke but then the director was like, ‘No.’ So I said, ‘Can you scratch my nose.’ That might be the one they use.”
We’ll be back with more on The Man with the Iron Fists 2: Sting of the Scorpion after we get Jack Knife and Madam Blossom’s opinion on the matter.
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Best Episode Ever and The Shelf Space Awards. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
