Bruce Lee’s unfinished film and TV projects revealed, from HBO Max’s Warrior to the controversial Game of Death – but did Warner Bros. really steal Kung Fu from the martial arts legend?

Nov 26 , 2021

Bruce Lee in Game of Death. Photo: Handout

Hailing from Hong Kong and based in the US, Lee worked on The Silent Flute, also known as The Circle of Iron, with Stirling Silliphant and Hollywood actor James Coburn

Warrior, which stars Andrew Koji, honours the martial arts hero’s original vision, which was rumoured to be stolen for a 1971 film starring David Carradine

One of the most remarkable things about Bruce Lee is that he became iconic in such a short space of time. True, he made his screen debut in Golden Gate Girl in 1941 as a three-month old baby, but it would be another 30 years before Lee got a leading role in a martial arts movie in The Big Boss. That film made him a star, but within two years Lee was dead. The martial arts hero’s most iconic film – at least in the West – Enter the Dragon was released after he had passed away.

Such was Lee’s awesome screen presence and his innovative action scenes that this bare handful of films was enough to canonise him as a silver screen great and one of the best martial artists of all time.

Yet given the sudden nature of his passing – not to mention his desire to achieve a certain level of fame – Lee left many ideas and works unfinished. One of cinema’s great what ifs is: what would Bruce Lee have gone on to achieve had he lived longer?

Not many details are known about all of Lee’s outstanding concepts – little known what he might have planned for Southern Fist, Northern Leg, for instance – but here are the most significant of Lee’s posthumous projects that the star never got to finish.

Game of Death

It’s somewhat ironic that Lee’s most famous look, his yellow and black jumpsuit, comes from Game of Death, a movie he never completed. Lee began work on the film – his second as director, following Way of the Dragon – and shot about 100 minutes of footage (although most this was outtakes) before the opportunity came up to work with Warner Bros on Enter the Dragon. That halted work on Game of Death and, sadly, Lee never managed to return to the project before passing away.

Game of Death has been released in various formats over the years, each version using differing amounts of footage shot by Lee. Most egregious was the original 1978 version of Game of Death, which uses just 11 minutes of Lee’s original footage and, in controversial, macabre fashion, even used shots of Lee’s own real life funeral, according to AV Club.

Another version of the film was released in 2019 called Game of Death Redux as part of the Criterion Collection’s Blu-ray box set of Bruce Lee films. This version runs to only 40 minutes but is a pure distillation of the footage created by Lee himself. Produced by Alan Canvan, it uses Lee’s extended fight footage and combines it with composer John Barry’s score for the 1978 film, according to IMDB.