For anyone who grew up watching Shaolin Soccer, the photograph felt almost impossible.

There was Iron Head. Hooking Leg. Iron Shirt. Empty Hand. Light Weight.

Five members of the absurdly gifted Shaolin team were sitting together again, older now, far removed from the green uniforms, impossible bicycle kicks and physics-defying soccer matches that made Stephen Chow’s 2001 comedy unforgettable.

The gathering, held in Hong Kong and reported at the beginning of August 2026, brought Wong Yat-fei, Mok Mei-lam, Tin Kai-man, Danny Chan Kwok-kwan and Lam Chi-chung back into the same room. Other familiar faces from Stephen Chow’s films joined them as well, turning what began as a celebration among old colleagues into something close to a reunion of an era.

But anyone who remembered the team immediately knew the lineup was incomplete.

The Fifth Brother was not there.

And 25 years after Shaolin Soccer, the reason for Stephen Chow’s absence created an unexpectedly perfect connection between the movie that made those characters famous and the film he is releasing now.

Six Brothers, Six Ridiculous Superpowers

When Shaolin Soccer opened in Hong Kong in July 2001, Chow took a premise that sounded like a cartoon and treated it with enough sincerity to make audiences care.

His character, Sing, wanted to spread Shaolin kung fu to the modern world. With the help of former soccer star Fung, he searched for the martial-arts brothers with whom he had trained years earlier and persuaded them to form a team.

Each brother came with his own spectacularly impractical specialty.

Wong Yat-fei played the First Brother, Iron Head, whose skull turned headers into weapons. Mok Mei-lam was the Second Brother, Hooking Leg, using extraordinary ground-based leg techniques. Tin Kai-man became the nearly indestructible Third Brother, Iron Shirt.

Danny Chan Kwok-kwan played the Fourth Brother, Empty Hand—also known as Lightning Hand—the Bruce Lee-like goalkeeper capable of catching shots with superhuman speed. Lam Chi-chung was the Sixth Brother, Light Weight, whose lightness skill allowed him to leap through the air.

And between them stood the Fifth Brother: Stephen Chow’s Sing, master of the Mighty Steel Leg, capable of launching a soccer ball with enough force to make an ordinary match look like a martial-arts battle.

The joke worked because every character was instantly identifiable. They were exaggerated almost to the point of being superheroes, yet the film first introduced many of them as defeated middle-aged men whose lives had gone nowhere.

Soccer gave them a reason to remember who they had once been.

That combination of slapstick, kung fu, sports-movie emotion and visual effects became a major success. Shaolin Soccer broke Hong Kong box-office records at the time and later won Best Film at the Hong Kong Film Awards, while Chow took Best Actor and Best Director and Wong Yat-fei won Best Supporting Actor.

Then 25 Years Passed

The actors did not remain frozen as the characters audiences remembered.

Some continued appearing regularly in movies and television. Others increasingly worked behind the scenes. Danny Chan became closely associated with portraying Bruce Lee. Lam Chi-chung expanded into writing and directing. Tin Kai-man continued working across acting and production.

Yet no matter where their careers went, the green-shirted Shaolin team remained attached to them.

That was what made the 2026 gathering unusual.

Tin, who organized the get-together, explained that the occasion brought together several reasons to celebrate, including birthdays for Wong Yat-fei and Danny Chan and the rare opportunity for Second Brother actor Mok Mei-lam to attend. According to Tin, the group had not managed to gather this completely in more than two decades.

Photographs showed the former brothers shoulder to shoulder once again. Around them were other longtime collaborators from Chow’s movies, including Vincent Kok, Lee Kin-yan and several familiar Hong Kong character actors.

There were cakes, smiles and the unmistakable sense that everyone understood how much time had passed.

But there were still only five Shaolin brothers.

So Where Was Stephen Chow?

Chow’s absence naturally stood out because Sing was not merely another player on the fictional team.

He was its center.

Chow wrote, directed and starred in Shaolin Soccer, building the entire story around Sing’s almost childlike conviction that kung fu still had a place in modern life.

Tin eventually supplied a simple explanation for why the Fifth Brother could not join the reunion.

Chow was busy promoting his new movie.

That movie is Kung Fu Soccer.

Twenty-five years after Shaolin Soccer, Chow has returned as writer-director to essentially the same wonderfully strange collision of martial arts and football. The 2026 film, led by Zhang Xiaofei and Dilraba Dilmurat, centers on a women’s kung-fu soccer team and is positioned as a spiritual successor rather than a direct continuation of Sing and his brothers’ story. It opened in mainland China on July 11 and reached Hong Kong theaters on August 13.

There was even another connection inside the reunion itself: Lam Chi-chung, the original Light Weight, worked on Kung Fu Soccer as an executive director, according to Hong Kong reports.

So Chow was missing from a Shaolin Soccer reunion partly because he was occupied bringing kung-fu football back to theaters.

It is difficult to imagine a more appropriate excuse.

The Person Who Can Never Return

Yet there was another absence that gave the photographs a far more bittersweet meaning.

Ng Man-tat could never walk through the door.

Ng played Fung, the broken former soccer star known as Golden Leg who discovers Sing and becomes coach of the Shaolin team. Beneath all the impossible kicks and outrageous comedy, Fung supplied much of the story’s emotional foundation.

Ng was also far more than a supporting actor in one Stephen Chow movie. For years, he had been one of Chow’s defining screen partners, appearing beside him in a string of Hong Kong comedy classics.

Shaolin Soccer became their final film together.

Ng died on February 27, 2021 after suffering from liver cancer. He was 70. Chow later attended his wake, closing a professional partnership whose characters had become inseparable in the memories of generations of viewers.

The wider Shaolin Soccer family has continued to lose familiar faces. Patrick Tse, who played the ruthless Team Evil coach Hung, died at 89 in July 2026, only shortly before the reunion.

That reality was part of Tin Kai-man’s explanation for wanting the old group to meet more often: as the years pass, opportunities to gather cannot be taken for granted.

The Circle Closes

In 2001, the Shaolin brothers came back together because Sing convinced them that the skills they had abandoned still meant something.

Twenty-five years later, five of the actors who played those brothers found themselves together again—no special effects, no impossible soccer shots, just old colleagues sharing a table and remembering a film that never really left them.

Stephen Chow was missing from the photograph.

But in an odd way, he was also everywhere around it.

While his former teammates reunited, Chow was once again trying to make audiences believe that kung fu and soccer belonged together.

The actors had aged. One beloved collaborator was already gone. Hong Kong cinema had changed enormously.

Yet the idea that brought them together in 2001 had somehow made its way back onto the screen exactly 25 years later.

For Shaolin Soccer fans, that may be the most fitting reunion of all.