The Rise and Fall of Tony Jaa || What really happened to Tony Jaa?

In this video we discuss the rise and fall of Tony Jaa. Tony Jaa (Ong Bak, The Protector) burst onto the scene in 2004 and was hailed as the martial arts movie savior; however, as quickly as his fame reached extreme heights and caught Hollywood's attention, things would quickly crash down. Find out why in this video!

When Tony Jaa first exploded onto the scene in 2004’s Ong Bak, he seemed destined to become the worlds savior of martial arts films. This fresh new face brought a jolt of energy back into a genre populated by aging stars such as Jackie Chan, Van Damme and Steven Seagal.
Ong Bak was a massive success in it’s home country of Thailand, but more importantly around the globe. Martial Arts Great Donnie Yen even stated that Tony Jaa had beaten Hong Kong at their own game and even acknowledged that Ong Bak was a motivating force to do better in his own work.
With all this attention, Tony Jaa was deemed and “overnight success”; however, this acclaim of overnight success completely ignored the fact that Jaa was not actually a newcomer at all, as his first notable screen credits came in 1992, 1994, and 1996 on few low budget Thai Productions. Soon after, in 1997, he was part of a much bigger production working as Robin Shous stunt double in Mortal Kombat: Annihilation. Jaa’s overnight success was actually a result of working hard and toiling around in near obscurity for over a decade.

The truth is that the idea of being an overnight success is a myth. It’s a carefully crafted narrative, which we conveniently buy into as a form of wish fulfillment. Anyone who has achieved anything great in life has tirelessly put in the work, the time and energy for years, sometimes decades before ever getting noticed. And that big break, “Luck” what some may call, is really just the result of preparation finally meeting opportunity.
Although we all want to feel special and extraordinary in some way, the fact is most people have enormous ability and potential, so there’s nothing wrong with being “ordinary”; what’s more important is to have extraordinary discipline, drive and work ethic in order to achieve any level of greatness.

Tony Jaa certainly has all the martial arts talent in the world; however, that is never enough; especially since the martial arts boom eventually faded in the 1990s. Add to that, one of the appeals that Tony Jaa has is that he can do all his owns stunts, without wires and CGI; however, major studios want their stars, especially their leads to avoid injury at all costs, so what actually seems like a big benefit for the performer to have is actually detrimental for a major movie studio if they were to use that stars abilities in full. These days a martial artist would probably have a hard time trying to break boundaries in their movie, with the studio consistently worrying about them and their investment.
Also, since the UFC entered the mainstream in 2006, it made mixed martial arts fighting a common sight. In the end, this made martial arts movies suffer, as the magic and appeal martial arts movies once provided throughout the 70s, 80s and 90s quickly evaporated.

Going back to 2004, the original Ong Bak grossed roughly 2 and a half million dollars at the Thai box office, and pulled in another 17 million internationally; and just like that, Tony Jaa, the newcomer seemed to be the biggest name in martial arts movies. Bigger and better things would soon follow with The Protector, which scored another chart-topping performance in Thailand where it grossed nearly four and a half million, and then another 23 million internationally.
Though critics were not too kind to the film or Jaa’s acting performance, it seemed his star was sealed and the big Hollywood offers began to roll in; After months of speculation as to what his next project would be, word began to circulate that Jaa’s relationship with Prachya Pinkaew, the director of Ong Bak, had broken down over Jaa’s insistence that he didn’t need the director anymore and wanted to direct himself. The studio ended up handing Tony Jaa his biggest budget yet in order to make his directorial debut with the prequel film Ong Bak 2.

The film ended up becoming a nightmare on several levels. Jaa ended up having a complete meltdown on set and simply disappeared for 2 months, causing the film to fall behind schedule. When Jaa returned to work he found his director’s role was taken away and handed to his mentor Panna Rittikrai. The budget got out of control and the studio made the last-minute decision to do rewrites and split the film into 2 in the hopes of recovering their massive cost over runs. Having 2 films instead of 1 gave them a much better chance of recouping their investment, but it ended up being at the expense of Tony Jaa’s career.