Back in 2011, Gavin O'Connor brought Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton to cinema screens as conflicted brothers in MMA drama Warrior. He's now overseeing a TV adaptation of the movie, with Gina Rodriguez and retired two-time UFC champion Daniel Cormier in talks to star.
According to the co-writer and director, he hadn't planned to take the TV route until writer Adair Cole came to Lionsgate with his idea for an adaptation.
"Over the years, I’d been approached by Lionsgate to do Warrior as a TV series and I honestly was never interested," O’Connor tells Deadline. "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," he adds. "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."
Cole and O'Connor will run the show together, with O'Connor also directing those initial episodes for Paramount+. They're writing the scripts are and looking for other cast members.