Real Steel Series: Shawn Levy on the Writer Search and How It Won’t Be Filming This Year [Exclusive]
92A little over a month ago, we reported Disney+ was developing a Real Steel series based on the Shawn Levy film. At the time, we knew the producer contracts had been worked out, and the studio and people involved were searching for a writer to flesh out what the series would be about.
If you don’t remember the movie, which was released in 2011, Hugh Jackman stars as a washed-up boxer who reconnects with his estranged son (Dakota Goyo) as they build and train a fighting robot to fight in the World Robot Boxing championship. Real Steel also stars Anthony Mackie, Evangeline Lilly, and Hope Davis, and it’s one of those movies that manages to blend story and motion-capture technology in a cool way. One of the things that most impressed me was the way Levy created the world of the film; it’s the kind of place that could easily be further explored in a series, and it definitely would feel right at home on Disney+.
A few days ago, I landed an extended interview with Ryan Reynolds and Shawn Levy about their fantastic new Netflix movie, The Adam Project, and got an update on the Real Steel series. According to Levy, once the news hit they were developing a Real Steel series, they switched from slowly talking to agents and writers to the “incoming call business.” He explains:
“We were slowly reaching out to some agents and writers. "Hey, you want to write a Real Steel series?" The day that story broke, we shifted into what we call the incoming call business, which is the business of you're sitting back and your phone's ringing and it's just incoming calls. And it's agents one after another saying, "My writer is dying to write it. Can you meet with my writer? My writer has an idea." So, it shifted the dynamic of the search for a writer and a take. And it just became a lot easier because suddenly the volunteers and the ideas were flowing our way.”
Of course, even though they’re meeting with writers and hearing ideas, that doesn't mean it will be filming anytime soon. They still have to decide on who to hire, open a writers' room, and get a greenlight from Disney. This takes time. Levy explains where they're at in the development process and how they’ve gotten some great pitches for what the series could be about:
“It can't be filming this year. We have now a had several actual writer pitch meetings. We are narrowing down the search and the ideas behind the take. There's a lot of different ways to go. It's a little bit daunting because a lot of those ways are valid and cool. And which one is the right one? I'll go back to something I said in our Adam Project interview. I'm just going to have to go with my gut about what is the right one, because there is no objective arbiter of right and wrong. I don't think we're going to, no. Because even once we pick our writer, we're then opening a room, we're breaking a whole season of television. So it's more of a process. But we are definitely making good headway now. And the way the news broke and took off has been a big boon to the writer search.”
Something else I brought up with Levy was the extremely positive reaction when the news hit that they were developing a Real Steel series. As we all know, fandom can be tough to please, but I didn’t see anyone saying anything negative about the news. I asked Levy if he was surprised at the level of interest.
“Yes. I was sitting at The Adam Project mix the day that story broke. I'm looking at the dozens and dozens of sites that picked up that story. A story about a possible show based on a movie from a decade ago. It got more traction than some stories that are about new business or more recent movies. It was just confirmation of what I have felt on Twitter specifically for years, which is that people have a love for Real Steel that is certainly enduring, but very personal to them. Very emotional for them. I was already excited about this possibility of developing that world via a series form for Disney+. But the way that story took off was final proof that, "Oh, wow. The love is still there. The interest is still there. Now I just got to tell the right story in the right way."
You can watch everything Levy told me in the player above.
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