Ryan O’Rourke is a Senior News Writer at Collider with a specific interest in all things adult animation, video game adaptations, and the work of Mike Flanagan. He is also an experienced baseball writer with over six years of articles between multiple outlets, most notably FanSided’s CubbiesCrib. Whether it’s taking in a baseball game, a new season of Futurama or Castlevania: Nocturne, or playing the latest From Software title, he is always finding ways to show his fandom. When it comes to gaming and anything that takes inspiration from it, he is deeply opinionated on what’s going on. Outside of entertainment, he’s a graduate of Eureka College with a Bachelor’s in Communication where he honed his craft as a writer. Between The IV Leader at Illinois Valley Community College and The Pegasus at Eureka, he spent the majority of his college career publishing articles on everything from politics to campus happenings and, of course, entertainment for the student body. Those principles he learned covering the 2020 election, Palestine, and so much more are brought here to Collider, where he has gleefully written on everything from the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes to Nathan Lane baby-birding sewer boys.
Sign in to your Collider account
Sometimes, reality can make for as good or better stories than fiction. Film has helped elevate some of those stories to greater dramatic heights, from more personal, high-stakes stories like Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer about the weight carried by the man behind the atomic bomb, to sweeping epics like Lawrence of Arabia, based on the life of T.E. Lawrence. Often, the most inspiring of those tales are some of the best, showing what humanity is capable of when they strive to give back, do something no one else has, or work together to achieve the seemingly impossible. Half Crown Media and Burns & Co. Entertainment are now preparing a film that aims to live in the same realm, recounting the arduous efforts of a missionary in China during the height of the Opium Wars in the 19th century.
Hudson & Maria centers on Hudson Taylor, one of the most influential missionaries in history, and his wife, Maria, as they leave behind their English way of life to adopt Chinese customs, dress, language, and more in their journey to spread the word of God inland. The film will follow their work through every step of the way, alongside their close friend, Wang Laijun, facing no shortage of persecution as they aim to change hearts and minds. By the end of it all, their story becomes the stuff of legends, ultimately leading to the founding of the China Inland Mission that helped establish Christianity in the country and opened its doors to a diverse group of worshippers and fellow workers following in Taylor’s footsteps. Collider can exclusively confirm that filming will begin on the project in Malaysia at the end of July, and we can share the full cast for this tale of faith and perseverance.
Leading the way as the kindly and determined Taylor will be William Moseley, who remains best known for starring as Peter Pevensie across all three Chronicles of Narnia movies. Charmed’s Poppy Drayton will star opposite him as Maria, depicting her as the real backbone behind the mission, without whom Taylor’s efforts would’ve fallen short. Rounding out the main trio as Wang is Ludi Lin, coming off of his recent return to the Mortal Kombat universe with Simon McQuoid’s acclaimed sequel, where he again played the iconic Earthrealm hero Liu Kang. They’re just a part of a massive international ensemble, also featuring Ted Lasso star Jeremy Swift and V for Vendetta alum Rupert Graves, alongside Tan Kheng Hua, Darren Lim, Jemma Donovan, Catriona Munro, Ben Van Lier, Wang Wei, Matt William Knowles, Kate Sullivan, Vanessa Yao, and Cedric Gegel.
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
Writer-director Matt Mikalatos will reunite with Burns & Co. to helm Hudson & Maria. Before the biopic, he penned the family adventure flick Legacy Peak, which the company previously backed in 2022. His latest will be the next big biographical feature from the company, which has the star-studded Jimmy Stewart film Jimmy coming this November with KJ Apa starring. In an official statement, Mikalatos celebrated the film’s diverse cast as a representation of the Taylors’ strive for inclusion in faith. “I’m so thankful for the incredible cast who have come together from across many cultures and nations to tell this story. Hudson and Maria would be pleased to see such a diverse group of talented people representing them on screen.”
Drayton also shared her own statement, expressing her excitement to play a figure as strong as she was caring. “I could not be more excited to play Maria in Hudson & Maria,” she added. “It is an honour to be part of Matt’s masterful vision and bring to life a woman who contained such unwavering compassion, resilience and courage. I am eager to tell her story with the depth and justice it deserves.” Producers for the film include Aaron Burns, Jack McClintock, and David Cook, while Jamie Taylor III and Angela Galgani Sullivan serve as executive producers.
Hudson & Maria begins production in Malaysia this summer. Check out the film’s official website to learn more and get further updates as work continues.
!['Chronicles of Narnia' and 'Mortal Kombat' Stars Unite for Epic 19th-Century Historical Drama [Exclusive]](https://static0.colliderimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/william-moseley-ludi-lin-poppy-drayton.jpg)
