The UFC’s female bantamweight champion Ronda Rousey has been unveiled as one of the new stars who’ll appear in ‘The Expandables 3′ movie’.
The movie franchise creator Slyvester Stallone announced the news on Twitter yesterday, revealing that another combat sports star, boxer Victor Ortiz, will also be on-board for the third part in the hit series that has generated almost $600 million in revenue worldwide to date.
Hollywood action stars like Jackie Chan, Wesley Snipes, Nicholas Cage and Milla Jovovich are also on-board for this installment which is scheduled for release in cinemas in the summer of 2014.
Rousey is the second major MMA star to appear in the series, with Randy Couture being one of the original cast-members who also returned for the sequel last year.
Gina Carano was the first female star to break into the movies though with a leading role in the Stephen Soderberg directed ‘Haywire’, and has since landed a role in another blockbuster Hollywood franchise, ‘The Fast And The Furious’ series. She’s also now signed up to be the star of a new comic-book movie, ‘Avengelyne’.
In both Couture and Carano’s cases those movie roles were the catalyst for them to abandon their fight career’s, so that may lead to concern that the same thing could happen to the 26 year-old Rousey.
Hopefully not as Rousey still has a lot to offer the sport. Currently a perfect 7-0 in her career to date, with all her victories coming by way of first round armbar submission, the scary thing for the rest of the division is that she’s still learning and developing as a mixed martial arts fighter. While her judo and submission game are unparalleled, her striking is still a work in progress and she’s acknowledged that by working with elite female boxers like Lucia Rijker.
There’s also big fights for Rousey on the horizon. We know for sure that she’ll rematch her fellow TUF 18 coach Miesha Tate in the co-main event of what could be the UFC’s biggest PPV event of the year, UFC 168 on December 28th for instance.
Beyond that a fight with Cat Zingano, who was originally supposed to coach TUF and fight for the title before picking up an injury, seems likely, while the real ‘superfight’ waiting to be made is with the equally dominant former Strikeforce champion and current Invicta FC fighter Cris ‘Cyborg’ Santos.
Rousey stated earlier this year after being linked to a role in ‘The Hunger Games’ sequel that she has no intention of quitting MMA and still has a lot to prove, but we’ll have to see how she reacts once she’s got a taste for being on the big screen and rubbing shoulders with Hollywood’s elite.
