Fighting With My Family to Become Stage Musical
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- 'Fighting With My Family' is being adapted into a stage musical, with original writer-director Stephen Merchant, Dwayne Johnson, and Dany Garcia producing via their Seven Bucks Productions alongside Tilted Musicals, Kevin Misher, and Birmingham Hippodrome.
- Jon Brittain, the Olivier Award-winning playwright behind 'Rotterdam' and 'Kathy and Stella Solve a Murder!,' is penning the book and lyrics, with Miranda Cooper (Girls Aloud, Sugababes, Pet Shop Boys) and Nick Coler composing the soundtrack.
- The original film premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, with Florence Pugh starring as real-life WWE superstar Paige, Vince Vaughn as her trainer, and Johnson appearing as himself — Johnson and Garcia also produced the movie.
- The musical will track Saraya Knight (Paige) as 'a goth outsider raised in a chaotic but loving British wrestling dynasty' who lands a once-in-a-lifetime WWE opportunity and must 'confront who she really is without her family in her corner.'
- Merchant said he always conceived the film as a musical, treating each wrestling match 'like a different dance number, building to a big show-stopping finale,' making the stage version 'feel like the natural next step.'
- The project marks the first musical from Tilted Musicals, a newly formed production company led by Cooper and U.K. producer-director Sam Hodges, with closed workshops beginning this year ahead of a public presentation in 2027.
Why it matters: The adaptation gives a commercially proven, crowd-pleasing biographical property — one that earned Florence Pugh a breakout turn — a theatrical afterlife aimed at live audiences, while launching Tilted Musicals as a new entrant in the West End/Broadway pipeline. The 2027 public presentation gives the team roughly a year of workshop development to translate Merchant's cinematic wrestling-as-dance-number concept to the stage.
