For years now, professional sports have accounted for most of the highest-rated, most-viewed programs on traditional TV. Now, perhaps more prominently than ever, they are expanding to dominate the big screen and streaming services.
The NFL, king of American sports TV, leads the charge. Tom Brady's "80 for Brady," a road-trip comedy featuring the quarterback's biggest Super Bowl comeback, exceeded box-office expectations for Paramount Pictures. This summer, Netflix will debut "Quarterback," a new series following Patrick Mahomes, Kirk Cousins and Marcus Mariota. HBO Sports will follow suit with its latest run of "Hard Knocks." And "American Underdog," Lionsgate's biopic about Rams legend Kurt Warner, is still celebrating accolades from its late-2021 release.
Football is just the start, however. The entire sports landscape is both connected and expanding on-screen. Nike, the NFL's official apparel partner, is front and center in "Air," the upcoming Michael Jordan movie from Ben Affleck. LeBron James, the Jordan of his time, enlisted filmmaker Ryan Coogler as a producer on "Space Jam: A New Legacy" (2021), a sequel to the cult-classic Jordan flick. Coogler is also a producer on "Creed III," Michael B. Jordan's current box-office hit. And now Skydance Sports, fresh off a production credit on "Air," is ramping up a partnership with NFL Films to create more feature-length content.
What's behind all these team-ups? Why is the sports genre especially relevant and successful right now? We sat down with several key figures on the scene -- Alex Convery, screenwriter for "Air," and Mark Ellis, editor of Rotten Tomatoes -- to dive in:
Note: The following interviews are edited for length and clarity, and consolidated in panel format.
What's fueling the recent and current success of sports content at home and at the movies?
Ellis: In our most basic sense, humans love competition. Even if you don't consider yourselves a sports fan, there's a reason everyone tunes in to watch the Super Bowl. We love the human element of it. How do you make small talk? Usually it's the weather or sports, and it's not always as interesting to make movies about the weather. And as far as why sports are relevant now, in terms of being a cinematic force, if you look at how splintered our society has become -- politically, on the Internet -- we still want that massive community feeling, and a sports movie's kind of a safe landing spot for that. The stakes are plain as day. There's some sort of redeeming factor. There's an underdog.
Convery: Sports can unite people, and it's been common ground around the world for centuries. There's a reason we still sign up for a season knowing we're gonna get our heart broken 99 percent of the time. Sports are a great expression for human emotion. You go through everything. Even in a baseball season, the best teams lose 60 games out of the season. Sports break your heart, makes you fall in love, gets you excited, gets you sad. It's a tableau for the human experience, really, which is why they're so resonant.
Are there other factors that make sports movies so broadly appealing?
Ellis: A sports movie can be any genre. It can transcend normal boundaries. You might have some people come watch 'The Sandlot' for the laughs, some for the nostalgia, and other people just love baseball. Like, Red Sox fans are gonna watch 'Fever Pitch,' and to them, that's a beautiful romantic comedy. For Yankees fans, that's a horror movie.
Convery: It's interesting, I'm a big sports fan that typically doesn't like sports movies, for whatever reason. Probably because I just love the actual on-court, on-field, whatever sport we're referring to, I love it so much that, often, watching a recreation is tough. So the best sports movies aren't much different than the best movies writ large, which all comes down to having great characters. ... This one ('Air') is obviously sports-adjacent. There's, like, one quick scene of basketball in it. So yes, it is a movie about sports, but is it a 'sports movie?' I don't know, that's probably up for debate.
Is sports content truly, measurably growing as a successful genre?
Ellis: Most of the highest-ranked sports movies in history, at least according to the Tomatometer -- critical opinion and fan opinion -- have been released fairly recently. 'Creed' (2015), 'Creed III' (2023), 'Moneyball' (2011) are all very high and relatively new. I don't know that we've exactly figured out how to make better sports movies, but people are trying to find common ground. It's kind of why we watch real sports in the first place, right? You love the game even if it breaks you. ... We have an insatiable appetite for sports. There's a reason why sports talk shows are on all day and all night.
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'Air,' which documents how Nike's Michael Jordan partnership began, taps into this reality.
Ellis: It's gonna land in 'Certified Fresh' on the Tomatometer for sure. And why is that? I think because it makes these guys human. It shows us Michael Jordan, his family, and these big names when they were just humans trying to build something great, when they were just people with dreams, taking risks.
Convery: One of the goals of the movie was to illuminate how game-changing the equity portion of the deal was, and how much it kinda started this wave of -- I mean, it's what people say in the NBA now, player empowerment. We're seeing it in college sports now, with NIL. It really started with that deal. A shoe had never been so personified by a player themself. And look, at the end of the day, we don't watch sports just for the teams, right? Otherwise you're just rooting for laundry. I think Seinfeld was the one who said that first. But you do it for people. I mean sports, at their best, is saying, wow, it's amazing what humans can do. And it's the people in the uniform, not the uniform itself, that creates value.
There's a meta quality to all of this, too, considering the sports fans who star in 'Air.'
Convery: Every day (on set) had its own little memory. It was such a dream to work with Matt (Damon) and Ben (Affleck), obviously. To me, as a sports fan, the funniest part of the production was, the NBA Finals were going on while we were shooting. And Ben and Matt are obviously huge Celtics fans. And one of the producers on the movie is Peter Guber, who owns the Warriors. So there was a little back-and-forth every day, those two weeks of the Finals, which was just hilarious to watch unfold.
Was there a Michael Jordan of the 'Air' cast, by the way?
Convery: I try not to write with that attitude (of envisioning certain actors), simply because you're just gonna get your heart broken 99 times out of 100. This would've been the one time where if I had actually pictured the dream cast, we actually got it. But look, especially on true stories, you almost don't need to picture the cast because they're real people. So I was picturing Sonny Vaccaro and Phil Knight and Rob Strasser and Deloris Jordan (Michael's mother) when I was writing it. ... I certainly never would've, even in my wildest dreams, cast Matt, Ben, Viola, Jason, both Chris's, and on and on. ... And look, everyone was great. Matt obviously has the bigger role and had more work to do on it. But I'd be remiss if I didn't say Viola as Deloris is kind of the gravitational pull of the movie and ultimately the heart of the movie and, in a lot of ways, the protagonist of the movie. I'll always remember just being able to watch her inhabit that role and just go to work. I mean, she is next-level in the movie.
What else can we expect on the horizon, in the sports content space?
Ellis: I don't know if people remember, but one of Brett Favre's last games with the Vikings (in 2009), Fox had a camera where you could just watch Favre the whole time. I feel like, in real sports, this is where we're going -- making those events more cinematic. Sports movies shine light on the humanity of these athletes. That kind of thing does something similar. You know, we
