There's a 2015 film called Life on the Line starring John Travolta about a crew of electrical lineman who, while working to maintain the power grid of their Texas town, find themselves in the middle of a deadly storm fighting for their lives. In the bonus features, one of the producers talks about how the film was initially pitched to him. An actual electrical lineman approached him and said they want to make a movie about their industry, lineman. Having no idea the profession even existed, the producer’s first thought was “football” lineman, and was hesitant because football movies tend not to perform well.

Now, saying football movies don't perform well isn't entirely true, they do well enough to be considered mild success'. But this got me thinking about why movies based on the most popular sport in the country aren't more successful.

A Metaphor

The first issue is the amount of football films that are not true football films. They’re mostly films about personal hardship and overcoming adversity where football is used as a metaphor for the characters overcoming and defeating their demons.

So what constitutes a true football film? For me it’s 2 things: what is the movie’s primary focus, and could it have been made without football. In other words does the movie focus on the game, and can the football aspect be replaced with any other sport, and the movie still be the same movie?!

As far as I’m concerned, there have only been 2 films truly about the game of football: Little Giants, and the criminally underrated Draft Day. These are true football movies because their focus is entirely on football, and they simply cannot exist without the sport. In that vein, arguments could be made for films like Friday Night Lights, The Replacements, Remember the Titans, and a number of others that are all based on true stories. But in my opinion, they fall under the metaphor category, as they focus more on the characters' personal hardships. I would not classify them as sports films, these are drama films that just happen to have football, but are not actually about football. 

America’s Game

Now, it’s true that the idea of the sport being used as a metaphor can apply to any sports film, not just football, but the problem lies in the nature of the sport itself. Movies are very good at making nearly any sport more exciting than it actually is in real-time. While sports like Baseball, Basketball, Hockey, Golf, and Soccer may be fun to play, but as spectator sports, they’re boring (that’s right, I said it. Fight me). 

Side note: I honestly think these other sports would be much more exciting if they reduced the amount of games per season; fewer games would make each one more meaningful.

The problem with football is that this is hard to do. It’s hard to make a sport that is naturally high-flying and hard-hitting more exciting than it already is. On top of that, football movies are harder to film because there are so many moving parts. Other sports may have more players on the field at one time, but none of them have as many players engaged at one time. In any of these other sports it’s easy to isolate a single player on each team to showcase them going one-on-one against each other; it is EXTREMELY difficult to do this in football. 

NFL Films

NFL Films has mastered the art of turning football into cinematic poetry in motion. It’s an art that Hollywood cannot replicate because they’re trying to tell a story, not just highlight a game. And if they were to lean into that sentiment to the point where the movie is basically just a montage of an intense game, then you might-as-well just watch a football game.