The holiday season, sandwiched between the fifth Avengers, third Dune and fourth Jumanji, will be something audiences haven’t seen in theaters for some time: A mid-budget, real-life sports movie from one of the major studios.
Paramount and Skydance’s Mr. Irrelevant ended up with a prime Christmas Day wide release — a coveted spot for both commercial and awards season plays — after test screenings conducted at the top of the year. Those screenings saw a score of 95 among men over 35, with an incredibly rare perfect 100 score among women over 35, multiple sources tell The Hollywood Reporter, and an overall score of 92.
Mr. Irrelevant started life as a pitch from writer Nick Santora. Dana Goldberg, then chief creative officer at Skydance, and Don Granger, then heading Skydance Pictures, reached out to Santora, who is behind Skydance’s popular Amazon series Reacher, for sports-related feature film ideas. Santora came back with a movie pitch about John Tuggle, a running back who was the final pick of the 1983 NFL draft. After landing with the New York Giants, Tuggle played just one season, going on to win the New York Giants Special Teams Player of the Year.
Skydance bought Mr. Irrelevant as a pitch, with 50/50 and Warm Bodies filmmaker Jonathan Levine brought on board to direct. David Corenswet, the breakout star of the new Superman films, was tapped to play Tuggle, with Isabel May (Scream 7, 1883) playing Tuggle’s love interest. The project was budgeted in the mid-$30 million range and shot in Australia to keep costs low, paving the way for a theatrical release.
Mr. Irrelevant also marks the first theatrical feature project under the partnership between Skydance Sports and the NFL, first established in 2022. (Not to mention, the first Skydance-produced movie released by Paramount since the merger closed.) The NFL and Skydance Sports partnership has also begat a documentary about Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, which sold to Netflix, a Jason Kelce documentary for Amazon Prime and a Hallmark movie, Holiday Touchdown: A Chiefs Love Story.
For the better part of the past decade, the based-on-a-true-story sports drama, like Mr. Irrelevant, has been largely nonexistent at the multiplex. Like many genres that had budgets that fell somewhere in the $20 million to $50 million range (see: rom-coms, studio comedies, adult dramas), these movies were deemed by studios as a financial no man’s land under the changing economic conditions of Hollywood and audience tastes for the past two decades, a time when tentpole filmmaking has reigned supreme.
When they make their way to theaters, sports dramas are most often star-centric awards plays like King Richard, A24’s The Smashing Machine or Black Bear’s Christy.
This pace is a far cry from the heyday of the ’90s and early ’00s, when movies like Miracle ($64 million against a $28 million budget), Remember the Titans ($115 million on a $30 million budget) and The Rookie ($80 million against a $20 million budget) proved to be hits. Unlike fellow mid-budget genre, the rom-com, the sports drama has yet to even find its footing on streaming.
Still, with entertainment companies jockeying for the broadcast rights to the NFL, NBA and MLB, and the success of scripted and unscripted sports series, from Ted Lasso to The Last Dance, it is a wonder why that interest hasn’t translated to feature films.
As of late, mid-budget movies that once populated early-aughts studio slates have been popping up in theaters. In 2025, R-rated comedies One of Them Days ($51 million on a $14 million budget) and The Naked Gun ($102 million on a $42 million budget) played well. And while rom-coms are plentiful on streaming, in a post-Anyone But You world, studios are teeing up more rom-coms in theaters, like Universal’s upcoming One Night Only.
Test screenings do not always indicate financial success, and it is still months before the movie heads to theaters, where it will be going up against some of the year’s heaviest hitters, but Mr. Irrelevant hopes it can prove a renewed — ahem — relevance of the real-life sports movie.
Borys Kit contributed to this report.
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