Gavin O’Connor is turning his critically-acclaimed cult hit fight film Warrior into a TV series. It has been announced that O’Connor will turn the story into a 10-episode ongoing series for Lionsgate Television, which has made a deal with Paramount+ to develop it. O’Connor is also in talks with retired two-time UFC champion Daniel Cormier and Gina Rodriguez to play two of the four main combatants that will shape the MMA drama, per Deadline.
O’Connor has created the drama with Adair Cole, who’ll also serve as an executive producer and showrunner. O’Connor is also tasking himself with directing all ten episodes of the series. With Paramount+ on board, treatments and scripts are now being written, and they are looking to cast the final two fighters and the characters that surround them as they chase their dreams. O’Connor had this to say about turning the film into a TV series:
“Over the years, I’d been approached by Lionsgate to do Warrior as a TV series, and I honestly was never interested. Over the pandemic, I was in a different frame of mind, and they said, ‘Someone came in with an interesting take, Adair Cole,’ and I listened to it and liked it. There was some really interesting stuff in there. I started sketching out characters, expounding what he had and gene splicing things, and I called him after the holidays and said, ‘I’m in. I think I want to do this.’ We started figuring out the characters. The thing I said to Adair and Lionsgate, which wasn’t in the pitch, is that this is about the life fight. I didn’t want to make something on fighting in a cage. That wasn’t the movie I made, it’s about a life fight. We will have two women and two men, we’re going to follow them through 10 episodes and hook the audience into their journeys and they’re eventually going to face each other. Like in my movie, I tried to challenge the audience: Where are your loyalties? Where do your sympathies lie? Who are you rooting for? If I hook the audience into the stakes of each character’s life outside of the cage, what I call the life fight, then people are going to be invested in the stakes. That’s the heart and soul of the show.”
The series will depart from the film, and the only shared DNA will be MMA. In the film, released in 2011, “The youngest son of an alcoholic former boxer returns home, where he’s trained by his father for competition in a mixed martial arts tournament – a path that puts the fighter on a collision course with his estranged, older brother.”. The brothers were played by Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton, while the father was played by Nick Nolte, who earned a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for his performance. The film scored with critics, securing an 84% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but it fizzled at the box office, grossing $13.6 million on a $25 million budget. After its theatrical run and subsequent home release, the film would go on to become a bit of a cult classic.
In terms of who Gina Rodriguez and Daniel Cormier will be playing, O’Connor explains that Rodriguez “will play a girl named Jessica Flores. She’s married to a Muay Thai fighter, her father is a very well-known boxing referee, and she’s been training as a fighter and grew up in combat sports. I didn’t have the role for her written when she said, ‘I’m in. Acting and fighting are my two favorite things. I’m in.’ Her journey is about self-worth, a girl who doesn’t think she is worthy of anything good happening. To get her hand raised in the ring represents her feeling worthy.” Cormier will play someone “fresh from an agonizing and losing bout his wife had with cancer. The character is not only left as a single father but with huge debt from all of the medical treatments his wife underwent in a futile effort to save her life.” Cormier recently retired after winning the light heavyweight and heavyweight belts so this feels like a pretty solid second act for the UFC champ.
Are YOU interested in the Warrior TV series?