It actually is not mentioned in the article, how this movie would be different with respect to other movies he was in at the time.
The difference is they wanted to motion capture his moves in addition to the regular filing process.
That's completely different from capturing the image of an actor on a 2d video frame.
Again, motion capture wasn't mentioned in the article, nor was it clear to me that even if that assumption is made that it isn't something commonly done in martial arts movies or limited to the Matrix movies.
It wasn’t unheard of, but wasn’t yet common in the early 2000s when the Marrix sequels were made.
Also, Matrix has lots of Bullet Time rigs, which aren’t motion capture rigs, but we’re clearly usable even back then for some “transplanting” of recordings to another scene, much more so than regular shots.
Jet Li was extrapolating into the future, but not far into the future. It was already common and happening 10 years later.
I don't think Jet Li needed to extrapolate into the future at all.
>He added, “By the end of the recording, the right to these moves would go to them.”
Li said back then, he was already worried that future technology would allow US filmmakers to digitally reproduce his moving body and superimpose the face of any actor onto it.
“I was thinking: I’ve been training my entire life. And we martial artists could only grow older. Yet they could own [my moves] as an intellectual property forever. So I said I couldn’t do that,” Li said.