Yesterday, undefeated American MMA Women’s Bantamweight Champoin Ronda Rousey confirmed that she will be taking on the role of Patrick Swayze’s “Dalton” in the upcoming remake of Road House.
For those of you who A) didn’t grow up in the 90s or B) never experienced joy, Road House is the 1989 classic in which Patrick Swayze moves into a small town to clean up the local dive bar and ends up loving, fighting, and zen buddhism-ing his way to wiping out corruption at the highest levels of the town. He also totally rips a dude’s throat out with his bare hands, and doesn’t even contract a lethal infection. Take that, Drogo, you candy-ass bitch.
Rousey has already shown her acting chops in recent films such as Furious 7, Entourage, and Expendables 3, but this will be by far the biggest undertaking of her cinema career to date. Road House is the first of four films being developed specifically for Rousey. The others are her biopic “My Fight/Your Fight” based on Rousey’s autobiography, “The Athena Project,” and “Mile 22.”
In a show of true class and the reason that I love this woman more and more every time I hear something new about her; Rousey wanted to make sure she was being respectful to the memory of Mr. Swayze, so she reached out to his widow, Lisa Niemi, for her blessing. Niemi was apparently glad to give it.
Not many other details are available on the Road House reboot other than that production will begin in 2016.
Speaking personally, Road House is one of my all-time favorite films. Usually I am frustrated when remakes of those movies come out, but it’s because the remakes miss the entire point of the original (hello, Robocop, you candy-ass bitch).
But M. Rousey has all the beauty, grace, and ass-kickedness of Mr. Swayze, and goodness knows could use some more blockbusters with female protagonists to show execs that those movies will sell (hello, Fury Road and Black Wid-oh right… they still haven’t made a Black Widow movie).
What do you think of the casting decision?
