“I think when I said that it was probably half correct,” Hancock says. Reached by phone, Hancock sounded a little bit more optimistic, but within limits. “There is no international on sports films (even soccer!),” Hancock said, “and losing that revenue source results in a lower budget to work with, which can be a challenge.” In other words, while LeBron James and Bugs Bunny playing basketball has an international audience, basketball itself does not, at least as the subject of a Hollywood movie.
#Cine tracer environments gone movie#
In a recent interview, writer and director John Lee Hancock told Script magazine he doubted he’d ever make a sports movie again, despite directing The Rookie and The Blind Side, which were considerable successes in 20, respectively. The only way you could make Space Jam 2 a more apt film for the current movie economy is by casting Spider-Man and Dominic Toretto to be James’s teammates.īut the box-office dynamics that make the new Space Jam the first widely released sports movie we’ve seen in over a year also make it likely to be the last we’ll see for some time to come. Modern Hollywood is driven by internationally recognized entities, action that doesn’t need subtitles to translate to international audiences, and fare made for younger, spectacle-hungry viewers. Space Jam is also a global brand, and one that contains other global brands-James, the NBA, Looney Tunes characters. It’s like The Force Awakens but with more corny jokes and one-handed dunks. It’s a project that checks off the boxes that studios love to see checked in 2021: recognizable stars (in this case, LeBron James, Bugs Bunny, and an assortment of supporting players that includes Damian Lillard and Porky Pig) and a familiar title that has built-in nostalgia value (read: parents who grew up with the original Space Jam can bring their kids to the sequel). The mere existence of Space Jam: A New Legacy might provide an explanation why.
How Lola Bunny Broke the Internet Hoop There It Is: How a Band With One Album Became the Sound of ‘Space Jam’ I Believe I Can Fly: The Oral History of ‘Space Jam’ After decades of Hollywood success combining sports and film, the tradition has entered a veritable slump. And other sports haven’t fared much better: Finding a baseball movie that received a national release means rolling the clock back to 2014’s Million Dollar Arm. All told, the number of significant, non-documentary basketball movies made in the past decade can be counted on two hands with some fingers left over. The pickings were even thinner earlier in this decade, when films like the 2012 Kevin Durant family fantasy Thunderstruck counted as highlights. One basketball movie a year might not sound like that unhealthy of a pace, but it’s a significant dropoff from the boom years of the ’90s. That movie arrived one year after Steven Soderbergh’s Netflix-produced High Flying Bird, which in turn arrived one year after the 2018 Kyrie Irving comedy, Uncle Drew. When Space Jam: A New Legacy hit theaters and HBO Max Friday, it was the first major studio film about basketball since 2020’s The Way Back. There was even a movie about bobsledding ( Cool Runnings).īut that was a while ago. Football ( Rudy, Any Given Sunday) and baseball ( A League of Their Own, The Sandlot) weren’t far behind.
In the ’90s, basketball inspired films as varied as White Men Can’t Jump, He Got Game, and Air Bud alongside everything from Sunset Park (Rhea Perlman takes over the coaching job at a tough high school) to The 6th Man (Kadeem Hardison stars as a basketball-playing ghost).
The big-budget, high-concept, relentless merchandising, and sheer Jordan-ness of Space Jam assured it wouldn’t be mistaken for just another sports movie, but it was another sports movie in an era filled with sports movies. It was the kind of movie they make all the time. How could it not be? What other movie mixed live-action footage with animation and teamed up the biggest basketball star in the world with a bunch of classic cartoon characters? But strip away the gimmickry and you’ll find a familiar-looking sports movie, one in which a group of scrappy underdogs overcomes adversity to win the big game. When Space Jam arrived in theaters in 1996, it was, in many respects, a one-of-a-kind movie.
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