Tom Hardy had only just started to "dream a little bigger, darling" one year earlier with Inception when he starred in Gavin O'Connor's Warrior, a Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) drama that flopped at the box office in 2011, yet amassed strong reviews and went on to earn Nick Nolte a supporting acting nod at the Oscars. Now, just in time for the film's tenth anniversary, O'Connor has revealed his plans for a spiritual sequel in the form of a series titled Warriors, which sounds like a better idea than a direct continuation.

Warrior casts Hardy and Joel Edgerton as Tommy and Brendan Conlon, two estranged brothers whose lives become re-entangled after they enter Sparta, a major MMA competition, forcing them to face the anger and resentment they've held towards one another since their late mother left their father (Nolte), a recovering alcoholic. Its themes about toxic masculinity, forgiveness, trauma, and addiction would go on to resurface in O'Connor's later directorial efforts, including his collaborations with Ben Affleck on the action/thriller The Accountant and the sports drama The Way Back.

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Tom Hardy, Joel Edgerton and a ref standing in the ring in Warriror

O'Connor confirmed his plans for Warriors during an interview with Discussing Film to mark the film's ten-year anniversary. And rather than picking back up with the Conlon brothers, O'Connor revealed the show will focus on two different male and two different female MMA fighters who compete in Sparta, including one who begins their journey in Ireland's Mountjoy Prison and a queer woman from a "Muslim conservative community outside of Paris." Should the show be picked up by a streaming service, O'Connor plans to direct every episode based on the scripts he co-penned with Adair Cole, with real-life retired champion MMA fighter Daniel Cormier playing one of the roles.

While O'Connor admitted to thinking about making a direct sequel to Warrior, his idea for Warriors sounds far more promising. As much as the original film reuses melodramatic cliches from other sports movies, with the first Rocky being an obvious point of reference, it's the cast's emotionally raw performances that breathe life into those tropes and make them effective, combined with the heightened realism and visual clarity of its bone-crunching MMA fight scenes. But more than that, Warrior feels true to life because it doesn't tie up every loose end and instead keeps its focus on paying off the heart of the story: how Tommy and Brendan begin to repair their fractured relationship.

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Tom Hardy and Nick Nolte in Warrior

On top of the challenge of continuing a movie that works fine as a standalone narrative, a direct sequel to Warrior would also have to deal with the fact that its leads are busier than ever these days. Both Hardy and Edgerton have continued to make their living as character actors over the past decade, oscillating between smaller, auteur-style projects (see: Capone, The Green Knight) and big-budget franchises like Venom and Star Wars, respectively. Combined with their growing involvement behind the camera as writers, producers and, in Edgerton's case, directors on their undertakings, they may not have room in their schedules for a follow-up to what was admittedly a commercial bomb anyway.

For his part, O'Connor explained he never figured out how to do a Warrior movie sequel "and make it better than the first one," which led to him developing Warriors as a way to explore the social problems he wants to touch upon, "whether it’s poverty, incarceration, mental health, or addiction." One could argue that, as compelling as Hardy and Edgerton are playing the Conlon brothers, the characters also served as vehicles that O'Connor used to address the topics that struck his interest at the time of making the film. In that respect, Warriors sounds more true to the spirit of the original movie than a clear-cut continuation would be.

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