A few months ago it surfaced that Paramount had hired Night At the Museum director Shawn Levy to produce a movie version of the hit TV ‘documentary’ series, Deadliest Warrior. The show has proven a gargantuan hit, so it’s perhaps not suprising they want to expand it onto the big screen.
Now though they’ve hired John D. Payne and Patrick McKay to come up with a script for the flick, but Variety says Paramount is keeping the storyline under wraps – no doubt though it’ll involve some mechanism by which the top fighters from various era and places are brought together to do battle and see who’s the best.
The TV show purports to be a kind of documentary pitting different types of ancient warriors against one another to see who would really win. However the fact is, most of the actual battles in the series are pure fiction, based on the scantest evidence.
That’s despite the show’s insistence it uses world-class fighters, historians and weapons experts to provide insight into the unique history and style of these combatants, which culminates in a head-to-head final fight between two warriors to declare which one would have been the deadliest. In reality they take the real info, and then in the final battle, pretty much just make it up. As with many modern documentaries, it’s entertainment wrapped up in documentary clothing.
However the concept of being able to put the greatest types of fighter from throughout Earth history together, is one that certainly holds promise for a movie, so let’s hope Payne and McKay can make it work.