Monkey King back on screens this fall

Hong Kong comedy icon Stephen Chow plays Monkey King in Jeffery Lau's 1995 romance and fantasy-comedy film series A Chinese Odyssey. Photos provided to China Daily

Jeffery Lau's project based on Chinese literary classic Journey to the West is being revived, generating a lot of excitement. Wang Kaihao reports.

'There was a sincere love in front of me, but I didn't cherish it ... If heaven gave me another chance, I would say three words to the girl: 'I love you'. If I had to set a time for that love, I wish it could be 10,000 years."

Among Chinese moviegoers, you will find many who have not watched Jeffery Lau's two-part 1995 Hong Kong romance and fantasy-comedy films A Chinese Odyssey－Pandora's Box and Cinderella－loosely based on the 16th-century Chinese literary classic Journey to the West, but it will be not easy to find someone who has not heard of the classic lines above.

On Monday in Beijing, Lau announced plans to give A Chinese Odyssey a new lease of life. The latest, A Chinese Odyssey: Part III, is to be released during the Mid-Autumn Festival this year, which falls on Sept 15, not only in China, but South Korea, Vietnam and Myanmar among other Asian countries.

However, neither the 54-year-old comedy icon Stephen Chow nor 45-year-old Athena Chu, who acted in the previous installments, will appear in the new film.

They will be replaced by younger counterparts from the mainland. Han Geng, 32, will play Monkey King as well as Joker, the monkey's reincarnation, and actress Tang Yan, 33, will continue the emotional entanglement with Joker playing the Fairy Zixia.

Actress Karen Mok is the only one from the old cast.

"I felt like I was returning home the moment I began work on the new film," a nostalgic Lau says.

"All the memories came flooding back."