‘Kung Fury’ Director on Heartbreaking Legal Drama That Halted Feature

Just a few days before the 2025 Cannes Film Festival kicked off, a leaked sizzle reel of a film called “Kung Fury 2″ caused something of a stir online.

The 10-minute promo — uploaded to an anonymous YouTube account (and removed less than a day later) — showcased an insane medley of action comedy and martial arts in a wildly over-the-top and mostly bonkers homage to the 80s, with Michael Fassbender as a renegade cop with an impressive mullet hairdo and Arnold Schwarzenegger as a Nazi-fighting U.S. president.

While for many the response was largely of the “WTF was that” variety, for others it was a very welcome reminder of a long-delayed movie that had all-but vanished from sight.

“Kung Fury 2” was actually first announced in Cannes in 2015, where the original “Kung Fury” — a 30-minute, green screen-shot short film about “kung fu cop” who goes back in time from 1980s Miami to defeat the Kung Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler — became one of the unlikeliest breakout hits.

“I have such fond memories of that time, not only Cannes, but the whole process leading up to it,” says writer/director David Sandberg, who also plays Kung Fury and whose hugely-successful Kickstarter campaign saw investors literally travel from around the world to his house in rural Sweden to assist on the short. “The passion of it was in the DNA of the project. Everyone who worked on it shared the passion.”

In Cannes, “Kung Fury” premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight competition, usually a platform for auteur directors and not high-octane stories about time-travelling martial arts cops, machine gun-carrying viking warriors riding dinosaurs (and much, much more). Understandably, Sandberg was a little unsure how it would go down.

“I was so fucking nervous, but when it started playing people were laughing so loud that I couldn’t hear what was going on,” he says. “So that was really reassuring.”

The following months and years as the follow up feature, eventually entitled “Kung Fury 2,” came together, were “totally insane,” Sandberg admits.

In two of the wildest pieces of casting, both Schwarzenegger and Fassbender joined the project in 2018, with Fassbender even coming aboard as producer. At the Berlin Film Festival that year, special “Kung Fury” bomber jackets were given out to distributors who bought the film.

“Kung Fury 2” started principal photoraphy in mid 2019, shooting predominantly at Nu Boyana studios in Bulgaria and later Germany. It then went into post-production which, given the amount of VFX and green screen technology involved, would take up a considerably bulk of the time (and the film’s overall $33 million budget). But then, quiet.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t the due to the pandemic, but trouble with one of the film’s primary investors.

Earlier in 2019, Creasun Entertainment USA, the LA-based financing and production arm of Chinese VFX company Creasun Media founded by Minglu Ma, took a majority stake in “Kung Fury 2” and came aboard as producers. As part of the agreement, the company agreed to fund two-thirds of the overall budget, totalling around $22.3 million, of which $10 million was to pay VFX powerhouse Double Negative. But Sandberg says this VFX money never arrived.

“Once we started getting to VFX, things started to really slow down — and things became a bit weird,” he says. “And then it turned out that our Chinese financier had basically stopped all payments.”

In September of 2020, a lawsuit was filed against Creasun. After what Sandberg says was a “year and half of legal battles,” a settlement was eventually reached in which Creasun agreed to fulfil it financial obligations. But Sandberg claims they still didn’t pay the money. So the production sued them again and the lawsuit rumbles on. Along the way, Creasun reportedly fought back with counter claims that producers had stolen money from the production, but repeated auditor checks couldn’t find anything in the figures to suggest that was true.

Sandberg assures that, even before the first lawsuit, efforts had been made to prevent it reaching that stage. Variety understands producers even offered to buy Creasun out, offers that were refused.

“They just kind of stonewalled every single attempt to solve the issue,” he says. “And it was just really heartbreaking for me as an artist who’s worked on this for years. And there are so many people who have poured their hearts into this, and I feel super terrible for them.”

Outside of the legal hurdles, Sandberg says that all photography on “Kung Fury 2” is complete, as is an edit of the movie. All that’s left is post and VFX, which he estimates would cost in the region of $5-$10 million.

In the years that passed after his passion project ground to a half, Sandberg says he “fell into a deep depression… I just gave up.” But he soon realized that, “as a creative person, what makes me happy is to create.”

So he got back into it, and began working on new secret new feature with similarly bonkers tones as “Kung Fury,” but none of the legal drama. He’s keeping a lid on the film for now, but says he’s working with Finnish entrepreneur Mikko Kodisoja, co-founded Supercell, the gaming company behind mobile hits “Clash of Clans” and “Brawl Stars.” Kodisoja is fully funding the project. No other investors are needed.

But Sandberg is also determined that his movie about his famed Hitler-fighting kung fu cop, alongside Fassbender and Schwarzenegger, will finally see the light. The response to the leaked sizzle — which he stated was an “internal promo video that was never supposed to be seen by the public” and contained “temp VFX” — shows that there’s still an audience desperate to see it.

“It’s a fantastic movie and I’m so bummed that I can’t show it,” he says. “But I haven’t given up on it. One day, for sure, it will get released. But we just have to power through it. But it’s incredible. Fassbender is incredible. Arnold is incredible. We had such a wonderful experience on set and everyone felt the love behind it. So it’s just a shame that it would end up this way. But it’s not over. It will get out there eventually.”