The Weinstein Company is going Asian. They’re planning to take Asian themed properties and turn them into Americanized, live action films and to do it, they’re in final negotiations with Memoirs of a Geisha star Ziyi Zhang to topline three of their upcoming films.

Variety says that if the deal goes through Zhang will start out by starring in a live action version of Mulan, the story of a Chinese girl who joins the army by pretending to be a man. In the Disney version, she also has a wacky, Jiminy Cricket-like dragon voiced by Eddie Murphy. Second up would be a movie called Samurai, yet another film about a peasant girl who pretends to be a man in order to hide from bandits. Maybe they should just merge both projects into the same film rather than doing the same plot with the same actress twice. The third project has yet to be announced, but let’s hope it doesn’t also involved pretending to be man. Ziyi Zhang is too pretty to waste her good looks under a string of hook-on beards.

All three projects would be done in English language. We’re basically talking about American films with lots of Asians in them. Think Last Samurai without Tom Cruise.

A lot of people have been impressed with The Weinstein Company’s quick rise to prominence. Yet though they’ve made a lot of money, they’ve done a rather terrible job of finding anything of quality. So far, they’ve been defined by cheap, knockoff movies with quick turnarounds for easy profits. This upcoming slate of movies sounds little different, a creatively bankrupt bunch of remakes and rehashing of similar ideas. What happened to the guys who brought us Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith?