The squared circle is coming to the stage. Fighting With My Family, the 2019 wrestling drama that helped establish Florence Pugh as a major talent, is being adapted into a theatrical musical, according to BBC News.

The film, produced by Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson through his Seven Bucks Productions, told the true story of Saraya-Jade Bevis—known professionally as Paige—a young woman from Norwich, England, who fought her way from her family's small-time wrestling promotion to the bright lights of World Wrestling Entertainment. It was a critical and commercial success, earning praise for its humor, heart, and Pugh's breakout performance as the determined athlete navigating family loyalty and personal ambition.

Now that story will get a second life with original songs and choreography designed to capture both the intimacy of family drama and the spectacle of professional wrestling.

A Natural Fit for the Stage

Wrestling and musical theater share more DNA than might be immediately obvious. Both are performance arts built on larger-than-life characters, physical storytelling, and emotional crescendos. Both demand athletes who can act and actors who can move. The WWE itself has long understood this—its events are essentially Broadway productions with body slams, complete with entrance music, costume changes, and narrative arcs that stretch across months.

Fighting With My Family leaned into that theatricality while grounding it in the working-class reality of the Knight family, who ran a wrestling school and promotion out of Norwich. The film showed how Saraya and her brother Zak (played by Jack Lowden) grew up in the ring, trained by their parents Ricky and Julia (Nick Frost and Lena Headey), before Saraya alone was selected for WWE's developmental program.

The story's emotional core—sibling rivalry, parental sacrifice, the cost of dreams deferred—translates naturally to musical theater, where internal conflicts have always been externalized through song.

From Screen Success to Stage Potential

When Fighting With My Family premiered in 2019, it arrived at a cultural moment when both Pugh and wrestling were ascendant. Pugh had just completed Midsommar and was about to enter the Marvel Cinematic Universe with Black Widow. Women's wrestling, long relegated to the margins of WWE programming, was experiencing a renaissance, with performers like Paige, Sasha Banks, and Becky Lynch headlining major events.

The film grossed over $40 million worldwide on a modest budget and earned an 92% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Critics praised its refusal to condescend to its subject matter or its characters, treating wrestling with the same respect typically reserved for boxing dramas or football films.

Johnson, himself a third-generation wrestler turned Hollywood powerhouse, served as both producer and supporting actor, playing a fictionalized version of himself mentoring Paige. His involvement brought credibility and promotional muscle, though the film succeeded primarily on Pugh's charisma and writer-director Stephen Merchant's sharp, empathetic screenplay.

The Challenge of Adaptation

Details about the musical adaptation remain scarce—no creative team, venue, or timeline has been announced. But the project faces interesting challenges. How do you choreograph wrestling matches that feel authentic without risking performer injury? How do you balance the British working-class specificity of the Knights with the American bombast of WWE? How do you write songs that capture both the absurdity and the genuine artistry of professional wrestling?

The most successful sports musicals—Rocky, Bend It Like Beckham, Million Dollar Quartet—have found ways to make athletic competition feel intimate and emotionally legible on stage. They've used movement, lighting, and sound design to create the sensation of physical struggle without literal replication.

Fighting With My Family has an advantage: its story is as much about what happens outside the ring as inside it. The tension between Saraya and Zak, the financial pressures on Ricky and Julia, the culture shock of an English punk in American wrestling's corporate machinery—these are inherently dramatic situations that don't require flying dropkicks to land.

Wrestling's Theatrical Legacy

Professional wrestling has flirted with legitimate theater before. The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, a 2010 play by Kristoffer Diaz, used wrestling as a lens to examine race, class, and American mythology, earning a Pulitzer Prize nomination. Individual wrestlers have appeared in Broadway productions—Hugh Jackman famously trained with WWE to prepare for his physical theater work.

But a big-budget musical adaptation of a wrestling film represents something different: a full embrace of wrestling's narrative and emotional vocabulary by the theater establishment. If successful, it could open doors for more stories from the world of professional wrestling—a subculture rich with drama, tragedy, triumph, and characters who've spent decades learning how to tell stories with their bodies.

For now, the Knight family's story will get another chance to inspire audiences, this time with a live orchestra and eight shows a week. Whether it can capture the magic that made the film work—the specificity of place, the authenticity of performance, the genuine love for an often-mocked art form—remains to be seen.

But if there's one lesson from both wrestling and theater, it's this: the show must go on.