Just weeks after walking away from competition, Ronda Rousey is back in the MMA business. Not as a fighter, but as a producer.
Deadline reports that the UFC Hall of Famer has signed on as executive producer for a gritty MMA drama feature titled Brawlers, set against the backdrop of Los Angeles’ amateur fight scene.
Harold Perrineau, best known for his lead role in MGM+’s From and his work in the Matrix trilogy and Zero Dark Thirty, will star in the film. Plot details are being kept under wraps beyond the LA amateur setting.
Jonathan Fernandez is writing and directing in his feature debut. Andrew Carlberg, Jackie Carr, and Fernandez are producing, while Rousey joins Erwin More and Jill Tanner as executive producers. The project has been awarded a California tax incentive and will shoot on location in Los Angeles.
The timing is notable. Rousey only just closed the book on her in-cage career. She returned from a nearly decade-long competitive layoff to face Gina Carano on May 16 at the Intuit Dome in Inglewood, winning by armbar in 17 seconds in the first MMA bout to stream live on Netflix. After the win, she again declared herself retired to focus on her family.
Rousey’s combat sports resume runs deep. She won a bronze medal in judo at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, becoming the first American woman to medal in the sport, before a dominant run through Strikeforce and the UFC that made her the promotion’s first women’s bantamweight champion and one of its biggest pay-per-view draws.
She later transitioned to WWE, where she captured the Raw Women’s Championship and headlined WrestleMania 35 alongside Becky Lynch and Charlotte Flair in the first women’s main event in the show’s history.
Brawlers marks a different kind of involvement in the sport that built her name, this time shaping how amateur MMA gets told on screen.