The Unexpected, Outsized Legacy of Better Luck Tomorrow

May is AAPI History Month. To celebrate, IGN is sharing stories about Asian American culture in entertainment starting with an interview with director Justin Lin.

Before the Fast & Furious, before Star Trek Beyond, before even One-Punch Man, Justin Lin bet it all on Better Luck Tomorrow.

Released theatrically in 2003 after its Sundance premiere a year prior (where it nearly ignited a fistfight between critics), Better Luck Tomorrow was, and still is, a key part of the American "Indiewood" boom and the wider canon of Asian American cinema. 

"It changed my life," Justin Lin tells IGN over Zoom, now 21 years after its nationwide release by MTV Films. "What the film did was not only present an opportunity to grow as a filmmaker, but after all these years, it’s protected me. Any time I feel like I might be veering off, I think back to [this] experience. Because it was very pure. I’ve been fortunate. I had no opportunities 23 years ago, but now I’ve been able to try everything. Better Luck Tomorrow set the tone today."

Beyond its vague connections as a distant Fast & Furious pseudo-prequel (as the first film in which Sung Kang plays a handsome enigma named "Han"), Better Luck Tomorrow is quietly one of the most consequential movies of the 21st century. Set in the suburbs of Orange County, it tells of academic overachiever Ben Manibag (Parry Shen) whose model high school student image masks a secret double life of petty crime. Soon the crimes escalate, and Ben is plunged into darkness with his best buddies and fellow honor roll students played by Jason Tobin, Roger Fan, and Sung Kang. John Cho also stars as Ben’s romantic rival who gets wrapped up in their schemes.

Better Luck Tomorrow did not pull off the heist of the year at the box office. In its opening weekend, it was eclipsed by that year’s Adam Sandler vehicle Anger Management. But it is now an understated classic revered by critics, film scholars, and those hyper-aware of Hollywood’s imperfect handling of Asian American representation. Meanwhile, its modest success – a gross of $3 million over a production budget of approximately $250,000 – made Lin catch the eye of Universal, who called on him to turn its middling Fast & Furious series into a behemoth worth billions. As a director, Lin’s films including Fast Five, Fast & Furious 6, and Star Trek Beyond, have grossed a combined $3 billion worldwide. That sum is sure to grow after the release of future blockbusters like his One-Punch Man. Lin is also rumored to helm the next installment of Sony and Marvel’s prized Spider-Man franchise (His representatives declined to comment). 

Not bad for an immigrant from Taiwan raised in working-class Buena Park, California, his sophomore film funded by maxed-out credit cards and emptied-out life savings. A last-minute transfer of $10,000 by rap artist MC Hammer also helped make Better Luck Tomorrow possible.

While Better Luck Tomorrow’s status is muted in the mainstream consciousness, its reputation as a provocative indie comes from its sincerity and artistic integrity. It takes its ensemble of Asian American adolescent males seriously. Their restlessness, their overt horniness and unsatisfied urges, are understood as sympathetic and even tragic than it would be a joke in other careless movies. From start to finish, Lin’s characters rebel against labels heaped on them whilst striving to define their own. 

"When I was growing up in the '80s, a lot of it was about assimilation, finding yourself in the assimilation of being American"

From an even broader lens, Better Luck Tomorrow is deeply informed by young adult anxieties at the dawn of the new millennium — a zeitgeist shaped by Columbine, 9/11, MTV, and the rapid rise of the internet. But Better Luck Tomorrow is more specific, too. Throughout the 1980s (when Lin came of age in the U.S.), generations of Asian Americans became haunted by "model minority" stereotypes. The concept is best defined by a legendary 1987 story for TIME Magazine, titled "Those Asian American Whiz Kids," in which journalist David Brand chronicled the academic prowess of young American citizens of Asian descent over their peers of other backgrounds. In interviewing Harvard’s Jerome Kagan, Brand was told: "To put it plainly, they work harder." Such narratives survived for years that when TIME published a follow-up story in 2014, little had changed.

"When I was growing up in the ‘80s, a lot of it was about assimilation, finding yourself in the assimilation of being American," Lin observes. "In doing that, there were a lot of rules that weren’t equal to everybody. I think it creates this schizophrenic way of dealing with life. You see it by suppression and not really dealing with certain things. Things get extreme, and oftentimes violent."

A real-life true crime case that inspired Better Luck Tomorrow puts into clarity how model minority stereotypes clash with reality. In December 1992, Chinese-American teenager Stuart Tay was murdered by his friends, who themselves were academically gifted Asian Americans with plans to attend Ivy League universities. Tay’s assailants believed he intended to rat them out over plans to rob an Anaheim computer store. The press came up with a catchy name for the crime: "The Honor Roll Murder."

Lin was in college when he heard about Tay’s murder and was struck by its proximity to his own life, even geographically (Sunny Hills, the affluent zip code where the Tay happened, is a neighboring town to Lin’s Buena Park). 

"It shook all of us," he says. "Because of my background, I could connect with a lot of what was being unsaid. At the time, I was taking Asian American classes, and they were talking about searching for our identity. With these kids [from the Tay murder], being splashed over the news, they weren’t searching for identity, they were shopping for identity."

"If I had one chance to blow it all, to take credit cards and make a movie, what would that be?"

Better Luck Tomorrow was not Lin’s first film. It was preceded by his more jagged-edge debut Shopping For Fangs, a surreal black comedy from 1997 about stolen cell phones, conniving waitresses, and a man who thinks he’s a werewolf. But Better Luck Tomorrow was conceived by Lin, and Filipino American screenwriter Ernesto Foronda, with feet firmly grounded on Earth. The two sourced the Tay case for inspiration, feeling it highlighted their own genuine anxieties about themselves as young Asian Americans desperate for individualism.

In striving to make a movie worth making, Lin recalls: "If I had one chance to blow it all, to take credit cards and make a movie, what would that be? [This] was something that intrigued me. I felt like something was amiss by the press. As an Asian American, I wanted to take a shot at trying to explore those experiences." Importantly, Lin and his collaborators never tried to make a true-to-life film about Stuart Tay. "We decided to use it as the basis to inspire us to explore the issues, so we weren’t handcuffed to make sure [to accurately depict] what was being covered by the news. This allowed us to talk character and be free to explore."

Better Luck Tomorrow is more than its director’s Hollywood calling card, and more than just the movie that introduced a cool-as-ice driver named Han. There’s youthful vigor in its frames, a freewheeling but forward-moving thriller about young adults on the brink of collapse, a remix of French New Wave cinema scored to LimeWire-era indie rock. Its 35mm film stock elegantly yet crudely captures the interiors of high school, from the harsh fluorescent lights of libraries to the smooth sheen of green basketball uniforms. Frequent use of handheld photography and brazen application of techniques like time lapse, slow motion, and montage rebuke notions that Better Luck Tomorrow is amateur. Instead, it is assertive, a film that supposes Lin and his team stole their quiz answers looking over the shoulders of Jean Luc-Godard. 

The grasp for identification extends to Better Luck Tomorrow itself, which Lin strove to make not as an Asian American movie but a movie about Asians in America. 

"Even in articles written about me, the first thing is: 'Taiwanese-American filmmaker,'" he points out. "I’m a filmmaker who is Taiwanese-American. I know it might seem like the same thing, but when you get the level of labeling that subtle, I do think there are restrictions. I don’t want to be put in these rules that are restrictive. I just want to grow as a human being."

The industry’s failure to recognize distinctions illuminated Lin how confining labels like "Asian American film" can be. No matter the praise from luminaries like the late Roger Ebert, according to Lin, American distributors felt Better Luck Tomorrow wasn’t "commercial" enough due to its cast. "Traditional distributors wanted to change the movie. I wasn’t willing to change the movie," the director explains. Even Asian movie distributors felt the same way.

"I don't want to be put in these rules that are restrictive. I just want to grow as a human being."

"When you sell [a movie in] North America, you sell the rest of the world. We did the hardest thing. We sold in North America. But Asia wouldn’t touch us. We were getting feedback from Asian [distributors] saying if they wanted an American film, they needed to be white."

After all these years, Justin Lin remains fond of Better Luck Tomorrow, its title accidentally prophetic of his destined prospects as a Hollywood mainstay. His next movie became The Fast & Furious: Tokyo Drift, the third installment in Universal Studios’ hit action series. Originally pitched by writer Chris Morgan as a vehicle for star Vin Diesel to return as Dominic Toretto solving a murder in Japan, Universal felt a story set at a high school could refresh the vibe. (Diesel makes a cameo appearance, as part of a deal that gave Diesel the rights to his sci-fi character Riddick.) Better Luck Tomorrow happened to be a buzzy movie about reckless teenagers engaged in crime, and so producer Neal H. Moritz hired Lin for the job.

In taking the reins of what would elevate Lin to a higher class of studio directing, Lin brought a piece of Better Luck Tomorrow with him: Han, played by Sung Kang.

While it is now Fast & Furious fan lore that Better Luck Tomorrow is Han’s origin story, Lin is less serious about those connections. "That was more for me," Lin says, calling it "more Easter egg" than an actual bridge. "He’s definitely a spiritual connection to Better Luck Tomorrow. I think it’s much deeper than a literal connection." For Lin, Han’s presence in the Fast Saga (including 2022’s Fast X) is more about widening opportunities for inclusion in Hollywood than validating his authorship on the series. 

"When I came up with the idea for Han [in Tokyo Drift], it was not a given that he could be Asian American back then," reveals Lin, adding that studios expectedly insisted on bigger name actors for the role. "Diversity was not a thing. There were healthy discussions about that. I don’t think there was malice, just the studios weren’t used to having these conversations. Even for the lead, I wanted colorblind casting. They were open to it, but they weren’t used to it. I realized a lot of times it was just getting into rooms with people and having the right conversations."

Adds Lin: "When I look back now, Han does have special meaning. It was a very special character. And the first person I thought of was Sung [Kang] for it. So to really fight for someone I believe in, which the studio had no idea who he was, I give the studio a lot of credit. At the end of the day, they backed me as a filmmaker."

After several Fast Saga sequels and blasting off to the final frontier, Lin is now in reset mode. On Zoom, he calls IGN from Thailand where he’s in production of The Last Days of John Allen Chau, a biographical drama about the 26-year-old Chinese-American missionary killed in North Sentinel Island in 2018. Like Better Luck Tomorrow, his next film is a realistic and sympathetic portrait of Asian Americans searching for their place in the world; Lin describes it as an "intimate character study."

"When I first heard about this kid, I had a strong reaction, like, 'Why would you need to do that?'" he admits. "When the banner came up and it said, 'John Allan Chau, 26 years old,' something hit me. I judged this person so harshly, but that’s someone’s son. It stayed with me. I decided to see if I could connect with the humanity [of him], instead of the 20 second judgment [of mine]. I want to try to connect with him."

It won’t be long before Lin again takes on a bigger scale project with One-Punch Man, a live action rendition of the hit Japanese superhero anime and manga franchise with a script by Community’s Dan Harmon and Heather Anne Campbell. 

However unexpected it may be, Lin feels One-Punch Man hews close to Better Luck Tomorrow in spirit. Telling IGN via email, Lin writes: "Better Luck Tomorrow and One-Punch Man are very much spiritual sisters in that they both explore themes of identity and purpose. The source material is so unique, irreverent but at the same time emotionally universal and timely. The challenge is immense, but worth it if we do it right."

No matter what comes for Lin next, his approach to his craft is still informed by the movie that got him any attention in the first place. In the end, Better Luck Tomorrow gave him the only label that matters in Hollywood: bankable.

"I’ve been fortunate to make big budget movies. But when I started off, there were no rules," Lin explains. "I could only approach everything [I made] as an indie movie. If you lead through passion, the why you’re gonna spend two, three years of your life making something, and you communicate that, it is a dream. The spirit of making Better Luck Tomorrow is still with me. I wouldn’t know what to do without Better Luck Tomorrow. After all these years, it’s really protected me."