In terms of its year of release, when is the last time you made a point to see a sports movie? For me it was
Moneyball in late 2011 with a buddy who pitched college baseball. Or maybe watching
I, Tonya on a flight to Seoul in 2018 counts? The movies we’re listing as favorites are from the 80s and 90s, leading to my guess as to how sports movies mostly died out – thanks to Hollywood corporatism killing off Mid-Budget movies.
Mid-Budget movies comprised their own filmmaking era, from the 80s into the 2000s – the same timeframe when Hollywood produced their highest rate of sports movies. And that’s my point: we don’t have a recent favorite sports movie because there aren’t (m)any. With sports movies hardly aspiring to be award season favorites or blockbusters, there wasn’t much of a future for them once Hollywood became hyper-focused on blockbusters that could be released with international appeal.
It was also no help that as their 90s prevalence grew into a distinct genre, sports movies became increasingly coupled with the larger comedy genre. Unless it was a children’s live-action like
Sandlot or
Little Giants, which were already kid-comedies, studios watered down sports elements in favor of brainless laughs enforced by casting comedians into every lead role.
When Hollywood treated sports as serious film, the occasional gems rose above the confines of their genre:
And as sports movies came to more often be treated as comedies, the results devolved into:
