Connor Storrie y Hudson Williams They have gone from being waiters to one of the stars of the moment due to the phenomenon that the series they star in has sparked, an unexpected fact being a low-budget project ($5 million), produced in Canada and filmed in Ontario in just over a month.
And ‘More than rivals’ (Heated Rivalry) was the phenomenon of the end of 2025 and in Spain it is currently the series of the moment after its premiere through the platform Movistar pluswhich adapts the novel by Rachel Reidwho is known for writing sexually explicit queer romance stories, especially set around ice hockey.
Specifically, ‘More than Rivals’ focuses on the complicated relationship between two players from opposing teams, Ilya and Shane, who maintain a secret romance and in which the tension, adrenaline and danger within the sporting context comes across the screen.
The unexpected connection of ‘More than rivals’ with Marvel
It is the series of the moment, but few know the origin of the story of ‘More than rivals’, which before being a literary success was a fanfic and that involved two franchise characters Marvelas confirmed by the author Rachel Reid herself in an interview.
At the time, Reid was not sure what she had written and chose to test the public by sharing an alternative version of her story on the Archive of Our Own (A03) website, where it is common to share one’s own stories involving characters from franchises, in a non-canonical way with respect to the original.
Thus, the writer reworked the story with characters from a franchise Marvel, Steve RogersCaptain America, and Bucky Barnesthe Winter Soldier, although in this story they were the star captain of the New York Rangers and a cafeteria employee, respectively. They both fall in love and live a secret romance.
However, this seems not to have convinced Rachel Reid, who claims to not know that the website was not just a fanfiction site and that she did everything wrong to find out if the public would like ‘More than Rivals’: “I wish I had never published it. I know it continues to circulate and it’s horrible, but that’s what happens when you publish things on the internet: they don’t disappear.”
That is why in 2016 he chose to remove it from that website and dedicated himself to sending his manuscript to different publishers, who noted its origin as fanficsomething that was tweaked until the original novel that ended up being published and generating the true phenomenon that its series is becoming.
In fact, the success has been such that a second season has been confirmed. It can be seen in Spain through the platform Movistar plus and in Latin America for HBO Max.