Bruce Lee story Warrior being turned into Cinemax show by Fast & Furious director and Banshee co-creator

Deadline reports that Cinemax has ordered a pilot for Warrior, a crime drama based on original material written by iconic martial artist and film star Bruce Lee. According to the report, Warrior has been a passion project for the late martial arts icon and Fast & Furious director Justin Lin, who is executive producing the pilot and may direct. The pilot for Warrior was written by Jonathan Tropper, co-creator of Cinemax’s Banshee.

Warrior is set against the backdrop of San Francisco’s Chinatown after the Civil War, centering on a recently arrived young martial arts prodigy from China, who’s caught up in the bloody Chinatown Tong wars.

In 2013, Lin’s company Perfect Storm Entertainment partnered with Lee’s daughter, Shannon Lee and Bruce Lee Enterprises to turn turn her father’s material into a television series. Bruce Lee spent years working on Warrior, but it was never published or produced. Years after his sudden death in 1973 at the age of 32, his daughter found a large collection of handwritten notes that Lee wrote on the concept and those notes became the inspiration for the show. Lin and Shannon Lee brought the idea to Cinemax in the spring of 2015, with Tropper coming on board as writer and executive producer.

Lin has also worked with Cinemax sister station HBO, having directed the first two episodes of True Detective‘s second season. He also directed the pilot and executive produces the CBS smart spy drama Scorpion. As far as movies, in addition to directing four segments of the Fast & Furious franchise, Lin also recently directed Star Trek Beyond. The busy filmmaker is also developing a Jason Bourne sequel that will see the return of Jeremy Renner’s Aaron Cross character, a sequel to Michael Jordan’s Space Jam and a remake of Jet Li’s cult classic 1982 martial arts epic The Shaolin Temple.