Madden Might Redefine What A Video Game Movie Actually Is
John Madden made history as an NFL coach and commentator before he became a video game icon.
After this year’s successes, it’s clear Hollywood will be making more video game movies for quite some time. With The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, Iron Lung, and now Resident Evil soaring to box office profits, the name recognition that comes with iconic game franchises is starting to look like a cheat code to millions of dollars, and sometimes even the start of a lucrative franchise.
But what about movies that tell the stories behind iconic games? 2023 gave us Jon S. Baird’s Tetris, a film about the puzzle game that took the world by storm, but there aren’t many beyond that. That’s about to change with Madden, a biopic about legendary NFL football coach, commentator, and video game namesake John Madden, and courtesy of Amazon Prime, we now have our first trailer.
Unlike Tetris, Madden isn’t centered exclusively on its protagonist’s contributions to the long-running sports game franchise. The trailer starts with Madden in his element as a genius, workaholic coach, before the sudden revelation that he has a life-threatening ulcer forces him to retire. But as the trailer shows, he can’t stay away from the game he loves forever — he returns as a commentator, and the trailer ends with a brief glimpse of the computer game that would permanently cement his name in pop culture.
The trailer feels like what you’d expect from a traditional sports biopic, but the centerpiece is Nicholas Cage as John Madden, complete with heavy prosthetics and a bodysuit. He’s the main attraction in an ensemble that includes Christian Bale as fellow coach and NFL executive Al Davis, Kathryn Hahn as John’s wife Virginia, Sienna Miller as Al Davis’ wife Carol, Joel Murray as Pat Summerall, Shane Gillis in an undisclosed role, and also John Mulaney as Trip Hawkins, the founder of Electronic Arts.
Cage looks almost unrecognizable as the beloved sports icon.
Despite not appearing to reinvent the biopic wheel, Madden is still a unique project. It’s clearly a sports drama, but it’s also presumably a video game origin story, making it a fresh and relatively unexplored approach to a genre that’s been part of Hollywood’s toolkit for quite some time. Quality-wise, where it will fall on the ever-growing list of biopics is hard to tell, but if it’s a financial success, then the ongoing video game adaptation trend might start to include stories about their real-world creation, too.
