Martial arts legend and screen icon Jackie Chan survived his own death yesterday, proving once again that he is definitely much harder than Ross Kemp.

But that really isn’t saying much.

Jackie Chan became a top trending topic on Twitter worldwide after rumours of his death began to circulate on the micro messaging site. Now, far be it from us to criticise the users of Twitter, but how stupid do you have to be to rely on it as your primary source of news about celebrity deaths?

Surely that’s what hecklerspray is for?

The dribbling morons who specialise in retweeting anything and everything they see, in some vain hope that people will care about what content they’re pissing into the vast ocean of pointless information, began spreading the news around almost immediately after the initial Jackie Chan RIP tweet was… erm… tweeted.

God forbid people would actually check to see whether a story was true before they spread it around, even we here in the hecklerspray bedsit took the time to consult our good friend Google for confirmation of Chan’s death, only to be disappointed by the news he was still alive and had also recently starred in some sort of bizarre remake of Vin Diesel’s opus, The Pacifier.

We’re putting this down to the fact that people want to be the first to break the news to you that someone famous has died. A few years ago this was done with text messages, we all remember receiving text messages informing us that Michael Jackson or Heath Ledger had died.

But no one cares about texting any more because we have Twitter, which is like texting only on a larger scale and infinitely more annoying. But because Twitter is instant you have to be quick, so those few seconds you spent Googling the facts could be the difference between being retweeted or having to retweet.

It was either that or an extremely bizarre viral campaign by Channel 5 in the UK, who were showing one of Chan’s more commercially successful films, Rush Hour, on their digital sister station 5* last night.

The best moment of this story came from the London trending topics on Twitter though, where Jackie Chan’s name appeared right next to the hashtag, #thingsblackfolksscaredof.

Come to think of it, Chris Tucker did look a little uneasy during Rush Hour…

Follow hecklerspray on Twitter or join our Facebook group or BUY ONE OF OUR STUPID T-SHIRTS!

This edition of the weekend box office was supposed to be all about Forgetting Sarah Marshall, the Judd Apatow comedy that stars Russell Brand and some bloke’s todger.

But, oddly enough, Forgetting Sarah Marshall isn’t number one at the US weekend box office this week. That plaudit goes to The Forbidden Kingdom, a movie starring Jackie Chan, Jet Li and the second-weediest kid from the last series of 24.

What does The Forbidden Kingdom‘s weekend box office triumph over Forgetting Sarah Marshall tell us about the state of modern cinema? Is it that audiences still aren’t accustomed to seeing penises in their movies? Is it that the thrill of seeing cinema’s greatest living kung-fu artists in the same movie overpowers everything else? No. It’s that people would rather watch two old men kicking each other than Russell Brand in anything.

The Forbidden Kingdom is the number one movie in this week’s weekend box office. But The Forbidden Kingdom didn’t just beat the new Judd Apatow movie to the top spot – it also beat Al Pacino‘s new movie 88 Minutes. If only Al Pacino had the foresight to make a horrible cheap-looking Woolworths ad right before the movie came out, maybe we’d be looking at a totally different story altogether.

Here’s this week’s US weekend box office top five…

1 – The Forbidden Kingdom (The success of the mostly-serious, Asian-set The Forbidden Kingdom might just open up a new chapter of Jackie Chan’s western career after his recent descent into gormless kid’s movies. Let’s just check IMDb to see what his next film is. What’s that? Kung-Fu Panda? Oh, OK, never mind) $20,870,000

2 - Forgetting Sarah Marshall (Without the number one weekend box office movie that he was all but guaranteed, it looks as though Russell Brand’s big conquering of America will have to wait until his next movie. Let’s just check IMDb to see what that movie is. What’s that? An Adam Sandler film about a magical storybook? Oh, OK, never mind) $17,348,000

3 - Prom Night (Prom Night‘s still in the weekend box office top three? Wow, there really is money in this Jamie Lee Curtis revival scene after all. There is hope for our watered-down, piss-weak slasher rewrite of My Girl after all!) $9,100,000

4 - 88 Minutes (Someone tells Al Pacino he has 88 minutes left to live. Oddly enough, Al Pacino doesn’t spend those 88 minutes weeping and pleading with God to forgive him for Ocean’s Thirteen. It’s what we would have done) $6,800,000

5 - Nim’s Island (Is it wrong that we actually wouldn’t mind watching Nim’s Island? Is it? Does that make us bad people? Oh, who are we kidding? Of course it does. We apologise) $5,650,000

Read more:

Weekend Box Office - Box Office Mojo

For years, western celebrities have been able to make a quick buck by flying to Asia and making shameful adverts that they hope nobody will ever see.

That’s all a bit one-sided, which is why we should rejoice to the heavens the fact that Asian megastar Jackie Chan has decided to come to England to make his own shameful advert, this time for Woolworths.

Jackie Chan’s taste has always been questionable to say the least – not only does he have a Hasselhoffian collection of sincere pop CDs to his name, but he also thought The Tuxedo was a decent career endeavour. But nothing Jackie Chan has ever done really comes close to the sheer brain-denting craptitude of his Woolworths advert.

The thing we can’t get our heads around is that at no point did Jackie Chan or any of his people decide that the Woolworths ad was a bad idea. Not when Jackie Chan realised that he’d be starring opposite two animal puppets that looked like they were sewn together by a blind, web-fingered sweatshop orphan. Not when he realised the script made zero sense whatsoever. Not even when he realised that he’d be kissing his credibility goodbye in an advert to promote some 70p T-shirts.

It just doesn’t add up, which is why we think one of the following has happened: 1) Jackie Chan has fallen on really, really hard times, 2) That’s actually a copyright-infringing Jackie Chan double in the advert or 3) The CEO of Woolworths has Jackie Chan’s children tied up in a basement somewhere. Whichever one is true, Jackie Chan should be proud that we haven’t lost so much faith in a celebrity so quickly since, well, since ever.