Warrior: Cinemax Orders Crime Drama Pilot from Justin Lee and Banshee Co-Creator

Deadline reports Cinemax has ordered the Warrior TV show pilot. The martial arts drama is based on original material from the late, great Bruce Lee.

Banshee‘s Jonathan Tropper wrote the pilot. Justin Lin is executive producing and may direct. Warrior is set in San Francisco’s China Town, after the Civil War. Deadline says, “Warrior tells the story of a young martial arts prodigy, newly arrived from China, who finds himself caught up in the bloody Chinatown Tong wars.”

Deadline reports:

Bruce Lee had spent many years working on Warrior, but it was never published or produced. Years after the Enter The Dragon actor’s sudden 1973 death at age 32, his daughter found a large collection of handwritten notes that Bruce wrote himself on the concept for the series that became the inspiration for the show. Perfect Storm Entertainment and Shannon Lee brought the idea to Cinemax in spring 2015, with Tropper coming on board as writer/executive producer.

Also executive producing are Perfect Storm’s Lin, president Troy Craig Poon and head of TV Danielle Woodrow as well as Shannon Lee of Bruce Lee Enterprises. The pilot is being produced for Cinemax by Perfect Storm Entertainment, Tropper Ink and Bruce Lee Entertainment.

In addition to his legacy as a martial arts and action star, Lee had strong writing interests and penned philosophy pieces as well as poetry.

This is not the same Warrior project previously in development at NBC and FOX.

Here is more on the Tong Wars, via Wikipedia:

The Tong Wars were a series of violent disputes fought from the 1880s through 1921 among rival Chinese Tong factions centered in San Francisco’s Chinatown district. Tong wars could be triggered by a variety of inter-gang grievances, from the public besmirching of another tong’s honor to failure to make full payment for a “slave girl” to the murder of a rival tong member. Each tong had salaried soldiers, known as boo how doy, who fought in Chinatown alleys and streets over the control of opium, prostitution, gambling, and territory.[1]

These various criminal tongs numbered anywhere between nineteen to as many as thirty during the full swing of the Tong Wars, but it is hard to be absolutely sure, with such an abundance of splintering and mergers between the various tongs.[2] While a loose alliance, consisting of the Chinatown police, Donaldina Cameron, the courts, and the Chinese community itself tried to stem the tide of the fighting tongs, it was the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and subsequent fires caused by the earthquake that was the death knell for the tongs at least in San Francisco, as it destroyed the brothels, gambling dens, and opium houses that the criminal organizations had used for the majority of their revenue.

What do you think? If Cinemax orders the Warrior TV series, will you watch?