Don’t do it, Hollywood. Don’t ever try to remake Road House. It’s perfectly perfect, in its own glorious, 1989 way. It’s bad enough that we lost Patrick Swayze. Trying to remake one of his most iconic roles for a cheap paycheck would only tarnish… oh, wait. What? You want to cast Ronda Rousey as Dalton? Oh Hell yeah, I’m all in!
Variety reports that UFC destroyer Ronda Rousey will star in MGM’s planned reboot of Road House, flipping the script (from a gender perspective) and casting her as the bouncer with a brain who is hired to clean up a rowdy, road-side watering hole. And really, the only people who would have any problem casting Rousey as a tough-as-nails bar bouncer are those who’ve never seen the lady fight. She routinely devastates anyone stupid enough to step into the ring with her. Sure, most of her film roles have made cheap gags at the expense of her fighting abilities. (See her in Furious 7 or Entourage, where she played herself and beat the shit out of Turtle.) But pairing her with Road House feels like a clever way to both provide Rousey with a vehicle AND to approach a nostalgic remake from a fresh, innovative perspective.
Released in 1989, Road House starred Patrick Swayze as Dalton, a sensitive but capable bouncer who kept things in order at the titular joint be relying on a simple philosophy: "Be nice. Until it’s time to not be nice." The film co-starred Sam Elliott and the beautiful Kelly Lynch. Just ask Bill Murray, who loves calling his old friend Mitch Glazer (aka, Mr. Kelly Lynch) every time Glazer’s wife’s sex scene with Swayze comes on basic cable.
The film industry has been trying so hard to make Ronda Rousey work on screen, even though they have to work around her professional fight schedule. Her roles, as I mentioned, have focused on her ability to beat the shit out of people. And yes, Road House will do more of than, but with a philosophical twist. (We hope, anyway. Variety says that the project is out to screenwriters now, so we’ll see how close to the original movie this reboot gets.)
For the time being, we guess that casting Ronda Rousey in a Road House reboot takes her name out of the running to play Carol Danvers in Marvel’s planned feature-length take on Captain Marvel. So, who should play that role?
