The rumored casting for the upcoming Bu Bu Jing Xin movie have been swirling around C-ent for the last month. Despite it being three years out since the C-drama starring Liu Shi Shi, Nicky Wu, Kevin Cheng, Yuan Hong, and Lin Geng Xin was a smash hit in China and beyond (and upped the careers for all involved), the underlying novel by writer Tong Hua remains quite popular so it’s no surprise to hear it got scooped up for a movie adaptation.

It’s like Pride and Prejudice has the beloved BBC version with Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle but there’s still enough love to go around a decade late with the movie version with Matthew Macfadyen and Kiera Knightly. There was the possibility of the drama cast reprising their roles especially with Liu Shi Shi and Nicky Wu both having a movie career but alas everything about the movie will be a different take including the cast. Filming starts next week with leads Ivy Chen, Shawn Dou, and Tony Yang. Strangely I’m quite onboard with this whole thing.

The production hasn’t released the exact casting of which guy is playing which prince but all the chatter says Shawn Dou is 4th Prince and Tony Yang is 8th Prince. I’ve loved Ivy since Black & White and also like both Shawn and Tony very very much. Ivy has had the worst luck with period fare, both the C-drama adaptation of Meteor Butterfly Sword and the TW-period movie Ripples of Desire were hot messes of the first order. She’s actually quite visually suited for period works if she plays spritely assertive characters.

Which works here since that’s exactly how leading lady Ruo Xi is, and the movie version will play up her time-traveling modernity much more than in the drama. There are apparently lots of liberties taken with the original text and a lot of situations and scenes will be different for the movie. I really don’t mind since the C-drama already exists as a pretty much faithful adaption, let the movie do something out there and see if it works. Plus reducing the entire story to a two hour running time does suggest that the end product will be vastly different than the drama, in which case the more the merrier for someone like me who still loves the heartwrenching story.