Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a 2000 wuxia martial arts adventure film directed by Ang Lee and written for the screen by Wang Hui-ling, James Schamus, and Tsai Kuo-jung. The film stars Chow Yun-fat, Michelle Yeoh, Zhang Ziyi, and Chang Chen. It is based on the Chinese novel of the same name, serialized between 1941 and 1942 by Wang Dulu, the fourth part of his Crane Iron pentalogy.A multinational venture, the film was made on a US$17 million budget, and was produced by Edko Films and Zoom Hunt Productions in collaboration with China Film Co-productions Corporation and Asian Union Film & Entertainment for Columbia Pictures Film Production Asia in association with Good Machine International. The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on 18 May 2000, and was theatrically released in the United States on 8 December. With dialogue in Standard Chinese, subtitled for various markets, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon became a surprise international success, grossing $213.5 million worldwide. It grossed US$128 million in the United States, becoming the highest-grossing foreign produced Mandarin-language film in American history. The film was the first foreign-language film to break the $100 million mark in the United States.The film received universal acclaim from critics, praised for its story, direction, cinematography, and martial arts sequences. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon won over 40 awards and was nominated for 10 Academy Awards in 2001, including Best Picture, and won Best Foreign Language Film, Best Art Direction, Best Original Score, and Best Cinematography, receiving the most nominations ever for a non-English-language film at the time, until 2018's Roma tied this record. The film also won four BAFTAs and two Golden Globe Awards, each of them for Best Foreign Film. For retrospective years, Crouching Tiger is often cited as one of the finest wuxia films ever made and has been widely regarded as one of the greatest films of the 21st century.