The Projector #80: The Incredible Vanishing Sports Movie (Patreon)

by Keith Phipps

Here’s something you might not have noticed, and it’s something that I didn’t notice until recently: Where have all the sports movies gone? We used to get a few reliably every year, be they raucous comedies or earnest dramas. But it’s been a while since that’s been the case. It never occurred to me until doing interview prep for a talk with John Lee Hancock in conjunction with The Little Things. I came upon another interview the director did with Script magazine that featured this exchange:

Script: You've directed two sports films (The Blind Side and The Rookie). What are the unique challenges with doing sports films as opposed to others? Do you hope to ever do another sports film?

JLH: I enjoyed working on both films but it is doubtful I'll do another. There is no international on sports films (even soccer!) and losing that revenue source results in a lower budget to work with, which can be a challenge.

There are other elements that make sports movies hard, and Lee touches on those as well: the need for many extras, the difficulty of filming action scenes, the difficulty of finding athletes who can act and/or athletic actors. Making them has never been easy. But because major studio films are made with an international audience in mind, material that doesn’t play well globally tends to fall by the wayside. Look at baseball. The sport has proven to be a rich vein for material for decades, but the last baseball movie of note, if it counts, is Everybody Wants Some!! back in 2016. Even that wasn’t big-budget undertaking. For one of those, you have to go back to Disney’s Million Dollar Arm in 2014.

From a pragmatic point of view, all this makes sense. But that doesn’t make it any less troubling. Like the rom-com and the adult drama, sports movies seem to have fallen victim to a changing marketplace. What brings it back? I wish I had an answer. Maybe Batman can take up tennis?

Segue! We’ve got a Zack Snyder’s Justice League bonus episode coming up we hope you enjoy. It’s just Scott and me. Tasha and Genevieve have yet to take the plunge. It’s honestly a pretty surprising conversation, though. Meanwhile, we’re leaving dragon and unicorn territory this week and digging into movies about the great Tina Turner with our next pairing.

As for articles to read, we’ve got some suggestions!:

• At The Guardian, Scott Tobias looks at Michael Mann’s Thief at 40. And at The Ringer, Alan Siegel digs into the film’s history.

• And at The New York Times, Scott Tobias considers the end of Superstore.

• For Uproxx, Keith Phipps talked to some arthouse theaters about how they’ve survived the pandemic.

• Vulture recently featured a fun, informative week devoted to character actors that included tributes to some of the greatest character actors working today, an interview with character actor super-couple Bill Camp and Elizabeth Marvel, a really hard quiz, and a sometimes troubling history of Asian-American character actors.

• At Vox, Emily VanDerWerff sounds a note of caution about pop culture lists that treat art as educational tools about marginalized communities.

• At The Ringer, Miles Surrey considers the evolving career of Bob Odenkirk: action hero?