Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, is a pretty known eccentric. His impressive work on Alibaba aside, it’s well known that the Ma has a flair for theatrics, something you’ll notice when he last did a presentation at this years Alibaba Annual Party. That flair for performance has now taken a big leap forward, as the Alibaba CEO is now going to be in a martial arts movie!
It’s not some bit cameo role either. According to the South China Morning Post (which Ma owns), Ma will have a starring role in the movie, called Gong Shou Dao or in English, The Art of Defense.
The movie will be released on November 11, which so happens to be Singles Day in China, the date of the annual online shopping extravaganza, which Alibaba’s online shopping sites Tmall and Taobao have regularly been a part of. Alibaba has however said that the two events are not linked.
Ma’s involvement and appearance in the movie were to promote tai chi, a traditional Chinese martial art that Ma himself has pursued for decades. Ma has already unveiled the movie’s poster on his microblog account and you can see him being surrounded by other stars of the movie including Donnie Yen, Sammo Hung and Wu Jing of Wolf Warrior II fame.
Those aren’t the only stars that’ll be in the movie as there’s also Thai martial arts actor Tony Jaa, Yuen Woo Ping, Jacky Heung, Natasha Liu.champion boxer Zou Shiming and retired Mongolian sumo champion Asashoryu Akinori. That’s not all, the movie is also being produced by Jet Li, who started a lifestyle company called Taiji Zen with Ma that offers tai chi courses online.
So he’s done a Michael Jackson performance and now a martial arts movie. That’s on top of founding on the most successful Chinese companies and being the richest man in China. Whatever will Jack Ma do next?
