In the years since Hamilton debuted, Lin-Manuel Miranda has done lots of things off the stage, from turning up as the weirdest Lee Scoresby in The Golden Compass to writing a hit song for Encanto to making his movie directorial debut with Tick, Tick…Boom!
None of his choices even slightly hinted at the direction he’s reportedly going next, which is… making a musical version of The Warriors.
Okay, that’s not precisely true: Like In the Heights, The Warriors is a New York City story. It takes place over the course of a night, following the members of a gang called the Dominators as they face all kinds of dangers en route back to their own territory after a gang meet-up in the Bronx turns violent.
This report comes via the New York Post, and the paper notes, “Miranda’s team did not respond to The Post’s multiple requests for comment.” So where’d they get the news? A “person near the Miranda family,” apparently.
The Warriors, though it is easy to forget, was a novel before it was an oft-quoted film (pictured above). The book, by Sol Yurick, was published in 1965; Walter Hill’s movie adaptation came out in 1979. According to the Post, Yurick hated the adaptation, which was not as gritty as his book. Roger Ebert wrote that the movie was, “a real peculiarity, a movie about street gang warfare, written and directed as an exercise in mannerism. There’s hardly a moment when we believe that the movie’s gangs are real or that their members are real people or that they inhabit a real city.”
Oddly enough, in 2016 the Russo brothers were reportedly working on a series adaptation of The Warriors, though that one sounds like it was picking up from the film rather than the book. There has been no further news on that project, though, just like there’s been little further news on Miranda’s adaptation of Patrick Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Chronicle, which in 2021 he said was “still a code that’s waiting to be cracked.”
Perhaps he will find new inspiration among The Warriors’ many gangs of New York. Can you dig it?
