The Shrine of Ultimate Bliss

The Shrine of Ultimate Bliss
Stoner Hong Kong film poster
Directed by	Huang Feng
Produced by	Raymond Chow
Written by	Huang Feng Ni Kuang
Starring	Angela Mao George Lazenby Betty Ting Hwang In-shik Joji Takagi Sammo Hung
Music by	Tony Orchez
Cinematography	Lee Yau-tong
Edited by	Peter Cheung Michael Kaye
Distributed by	Golden Harvest
Release date	2 August 1974 (1974-08-02)
Running time	107 minutes
Country	Hong Kong
Language	Cantonese English
Box office	HK$555,003

The Shrine of Ultimate Bliss, also known as Stoner, A Man Called Stoner, and Hong Kong Hitman (Chinese: 鐵金剛大破紫陽觀) is a 1974 Hong Kong action film which was produced by Raymond Chow and directed by Huang Feng. The film was originally scheduled to be Bruce Lee's next film after Game of Death. However Lee died while filming Game of Death in 1973 and that film's release date was delayed by five years.

When a tough Australian cop named Stoner (George Lazenby) discovers that his sister has overdosed on a deadly new drug called "The Happy Pill" (an aphrodisiac/hallucenogen mixture), he travels to Hong Kong to track down its creators. Along the way, he meets up with a beautiful secret agent (Angela Mao) who's on her own mission to investigate the same drug ring.

Originally, The Shrine of Ultimate Bliss was to star not only Lee, but also Japanese film star Sonny Chiba as well. The film was to pit Lee against "The Western Adversary" played by James Bond star George Lazenby. Lazenby had been signed to a multi-picture deal by Lee and Chow during Game of Death and was to star in that film, as well as two subsequent films with Lee. The film's original tagline was "It's Lee! It's Lazenby! It's Bruce Versus Bond!".

Warner Brothers was going to co-produce and distribute the film before Lee's sudden death and was going to give The Shrine of Ultimate Bliss a large worldwide release, a $10,000,000 production budget and a $10,000,000 worldwide marketing budget (which was astronomical at that time – as a comparison the 1974 James Bond film The Man With The Golden Gun also a 1974 release had only a $7,000,000 production budget and a $6,000,000 worldwide marketing budget). Forecasts for The Shrine of Ultimate Bliss' worldwide box office gross were around $400,000,000. This based on Lee's previous two films. Enter the Dragon (1973) cost just $850,000 to produce and also had a $10,000,000 worldwide marketing budget, and in turn it grossed more than $265,000,000 worldwide at the box office (through 2006), making it the second highest grossing movie worldwide of the year 1973, behind The Exorcist.