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Without a doubt, one of the best and most unsung sports movies of the last decade has to be Gavin O’Connor’s MMA drama Warrior. The plot follows two estranged brothers, both of whom have a frosty relationship with their recovering alcoholic father, as they end up on a collision course in a million-dollar MMA tournament.
Despite being related by blood, Joel Edgerton’s teacher and family man Brendan couldn’t be more different than Tom Hardy’s Tommy, his brutish ex-Marine sibling who bulldozes through the competition. Warrior ended up bombing at the box office after failing to recoup the modest $25 million budget, but it drew strong reviews from critics and ended up landing Nick Nolte an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor.
O’Connor has admitted in the past that he toyed with the idea of putting a sequel together, but in a new interview the filmmaker confirmed that he’s now partnered up with Lionsgate TV to deliver a spinoff series that isn’t connected to the film.
“With Lionsgate, I’m going to do Warrior as a TV series. It’s not the movie, so there’s no Conlan family, there’s none of the brothers or dad, there are no characters from the movie. But the show will be in the spirit of the movie. It will be dealing with social issues that are important to me, as there were social issues that were important to me back then that I was dramatizing.
There will be characters fighting for something bigger than themselves. We will get the audience to understand and feel deep feelings for the characters before they end up fighting each other, along with the emotional complexity of that. It’s the painful realities of contemporary America I want to deal with. I’m dealing with issues, whether it’s poverty, incarceration, mental health, or addiction; it’s social issues that are important to me that I want to explore in a series, but through different characters.”
Frank Grillo’s criminally underrated show Kingdom proved that the world of mixed martial arts is prime fodder for hard-hitting family drama, which is reason enough to get excited at the prospect of Warriors. O’Connor additionally revealed that retired UFC legend Daniel Cormier has already signed up to play a major role in the series, so it’s just a case of hoping that a network or streaming service will take the plunge and provide a means to make it a reality.