Matt Damon — no, not Meth Damon — is getting back with best bud Ben Affleck just a year after their period rape revenge epic, The Last Duel, debuted to warm reviews (its poor commercial response notwithstanding. As Ridley Scott would say, damn you smartphone-ruined Millennials.)
The trailer for their brand new film has just dropped, and it's tackling a subject matter a little less controversial: the paradigm-changing deal between elite NBA star Michael Jordan and a burgeoning sports shoe company, Nike, which seemed all but impossible in the mid-eighties.
The pair have assembled an all-star cast for a film about the most all-star collaboration in history. Wracking up the IMDB list alongside Affleck and Damon, who play sports marketing whizz Sonny Vaccaro and former Nike CEO Phil Knight, are Jason Bateman, Chris Messina, Marlon Wayans and Chris Tucker. Newly-minted EGOT Viola Davis is also teaming up with her real-life husband Julius Tennon as Michael Jordan's parents, Deloris and James Jordan. Notably, no one is attached to the role of Michael Jordan, and that's because he's not in it. "Jordan will be a mythic figure hovering above the movie and never seen,” The Hollywood Reporter detailed when the film was first announced. Guess we'll have to wait for the Space Jam docuseries.
The trailer does a pretty amazing job of setting up the kind of rags-to-riches story that gets the emotions swelling, although usually those tales aren't made about multi-million dollar conglomerates. Still, we open on a very bleak time for Nike, way before it became the high-fashion behemoth it is today and was in desperate need of a win. To quote Marlon Wayans in the trailer, “there's nothing cool about Nike”. Oh, how times have changed.
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The film will chronicle the development of the now-iconic Air Jordan basketball shoe, with Damon's Vaccaro plucking a little-known player by the name of Michael Jordan, only in his second season with the Chicago Bulls, as their legend-in-the-making. Once Jordan donned the shoes on the court, the rest is history. But this film will tell the history before that. Here's the full trailer.
Affleck will take up directorial duties and hopefully, this one is more Argo and less Live By Night, a movie that certainly exists. The pair, however, have both written, co-starred and produced the movie, and considering the fruits of that partnership in the past (Oscar glory for Good Will Hunting), we're tentatively excited.
