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Sports
Films  Sports Films are those that have a sports setting (football or baseball
stadium, arena, or the Olympics, etc.), competitive event (the 'big game,'
'fight,' or 'competition'), and/or athlete (boxer, racer, surfer, etc.) that
are central and predominant in the story. Dramatic sports films or biographies have created memorable portraits
of all-American sports heroes, individual athletes, or teams who are faced
with tough odds in a championship match, race or large-scale sporting event,
soul-searching or physical/psychological injuries, or romantic sub-plot distractions.
Fictional sports films normally present a single sport (the most common being
baseball, football, basketball, and boxing), and include the training and
rise (and/or fall) of the underdog or champion in the world of sports.
Sports films may be fictional or non-fictional; and they are a hybrid sub-genre category, although they are often one of the following:
Most Popular Sports Theme: There have been a number of "sports films" that have stretched the definition of a sports film, such as:
The Most Oscar-Winning and Nominated Sports Films: The sports in films with the most nominations (and wins) include Boxing, Football, Baseball, and Billiards/Pool, followed by many other examples of sports. While many sports films have been nominated, only 16 films in the sub-genre (as of 2019) that are NOT documentaries have ever won at the Academy Awards, with 29 trophies among them. The Champ (1931/32) was the first sports-themed movie to receive an Academy Award nomination. The first sports movie to win the Best Picture Academy Award was Rocky (1976), often on the ten-best sports film lists. The only other two were Chariots of Fire (1981, UK) and Million Dollar Baby (2004). Robert DeNiro won a Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of real-life boxer Jake LaMotta in Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull (1980), while Hilary Swank won a Best Actress Oscar for portraying a working-class waitress who aspired to be a professional women's boxer in Million Dollar Baby (2004). Kirk Douglas earned his first Oscar nomination playing middleweight Midge Kelly in Champion (1949). Paul Newman won Best Actor in the sequel The Color of Money (1986). And Sandra Bullock won Best Actress for her role in the semi-autobiographical sports-drama film The Blind Side (2009). This was only the second instance in which a female won the top acting honor for a sports role. Five documentary features are in the list below, but not counted as feature film Oscar winners: Hoop Dreams (1994), When We Were Kings (1996), Murderball (2005), Undefeated (2011) and Icarus (2017).
Top Grossing Sports Films (Since the Late 1970s and 1980s): From 1976 to 2019, only 17 true sports movies had made more than $100 million at the box office:
As of 2016, the average sports drama (of wide releases only) earned $40.1 million, while the average sports comedy (of wide releases only) earned $35.5 million, according to Box Office Mojo. The top-earning sports drama was The Blind Side (2009), while the top-earning sports comedy was The Waterboy (1998). The domestic grosses of almost every type of sports film (made since the late 1970s and 1980s to the year 2019) were compared below, and led to this compilation (figures should be considered approximate):
Popular Real-Life Sports Characters: A number of sports films have documented or portrayed real-life characters, such as the following:
Popular Football Films: In the Oscar-nominated The Blind Side (2009), a semi-autobiographical sports drama, the plot told about Michael Oher - who was able to overcome poverty and adoption (in the family of Leigh Anne Tuohy (Oscar-winning Sandra Bullock)), to eventually become an NFL football player - an offensive lineman for the Baltimore Ravens. Baseball Sports Films:
The immensely popular fantasy/drama Field of Dreams (1989) concerned the creation of a ball diamond in the middle of an Iowa cornfield by a farmer (Kevin Costner). Writer/director John Sayles' Eight Men Out (1988) dramatized the infamous episode in professional baseball of the scandalous 1919 World Series that was fixed - with its final sepia-toned shots of banned ball-player "Shoeless" Joe Jackson (D.B. Sweeney) in the minors. And Tommy Lee Jones starred as the legendary baseball great Ty Cobb in Shelton's Cobb (1994). The popular Penny Marshall-directed A League of Their Own (1992) portrayed a 1940s female baseball team named the Rockford Peaches in the All American Girls Professional Baseball League (including players Madonna, Geena Davis, and Rosie O'Donnell), coached by Tom Hanks! More recently, Moneyball (2011) starred Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, general manager in the early 2000s of the Oakland Athletics, who radically believed in relying on statistics alone to pick players for the team. Basketball Sports Films: Basketball-related sports dramas are not as numerous: three notable ones were Spike Lee's He Got Game (1998) with Denzel Washington as the convict father of a promising basketball athlete, David Anspaugh's Hoosiers (1986) about an underdog 50s basketball team (coached by Gene Hackman) that won the state championship, and Ron Shelton's play-filled, trash-talking court action film White Men Can't Jump (1992) with its two basketball hustlers/con-artists (Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes) and their scenes of two-on-two tournaments. The family-friendly comedy sports-related film Space Jam (1996), the first full-length picture for Warner Bros.' Looney Tunes characters, starred real-life basketball superstar Michael Jordan AND Bugs Bunny in a blend of live-action and animation. Boxing Sports Films:
One of the best films of the 80s decade, Raging Bull (1980) was Martin Scorsese's tough, visceral and uncompromising biopic film of the rise and fall of prizefighter Jake La Motta with a remarkable performance by actor Robert DeNiro. The stylized scenes in the ring included flying blood and sweat, exaggerated flashbulb camera flashes, slow-motion and violent punching sounds. The all-American fictional, underdog Philadelphia boxing hero Rocky Balboa in the populist, feel-good, Oscar-winning drama Rocky (1976) series emerged as the peak boxing-film series, with a reprised film in the next decade, Rocky Balboa (2006) and off-shoot sequels that followed: Creed (2015) and Creed II (2018):
Other Sports Films: And Paul Newman portrayed swaggering, upstart poolshark gambler Fast Eddie Felson in The Hustler (1961) in the world of professional pool, shooting against the great champ Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason). Newman reprised his role in Martin Scorsese's The Color of Money (1986). Autoracing in the Daytona 500 was featured in the action/drama Days of Thunder (1990). Ron Howard's Rush (2013) told of the intense 1970s rivalry between two Formula One competitive speed-racers: handsome playboy James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) and Austrian opponent Niki Lauda (Daniel Bruhl). The most successful car-racing film was Pixar's/Disney's animated Cars (2006). And one of the most memorable ice hockey films was Slap Shot (1977), with Paul Newman as inspiring player-coach Reg Dunlop of a minor-league team. One of the most successful ice-hockey films was Miracle (2004), the true story of the 1980s US Olympic hockey team, coached by Herb Brooks (Kurt Russell), who led the team to improbable victory over the Russians. The Best Picture winner Chariots of Fire (1981) told the parallel stories of two English runners (one a devout Protestant, the other Jewish) competing in the 1924 Paris Olympics. Downhill Racer (1969) starred Robert Redford as an American downhill skier training to become an Olympic superstar. Some of the "Worst" Sports Films: Other than some of the most classic and best sports films, there are also those that are sometimes considered the 'worst' sports-related films of all time, such as:
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Typical
sports football films (with biographical elements) include the
sentimental biography of the Notre Dame football coach, Lloyd Bacon's 
One
of the best sports biopics was Sam Wood's The Pride of the
Yankees (1942) with Gary Cooper in a fine performance as New
York Yankees great Lou Gehrig. In The Jackie Robinson Story
(1950), the famed black player who crossed
the major-league 'color-line' and joined the Brooklyn Dodgers portrayed
himself. Director Barry Levinson's mythical and romanticized
film about baseball titled The Natural (1984) featured
Robert Redford as Roy Hobbs - a gifted baseball player who made
a fairytale comeback and led his New York team to the World Series.
Ron Shelton, who was an actual ex-minor leaguer, wrote and directed
the intelligent comedy/drama 
Films
about boxing are perhaps the most numerous sub-genre, and one
of the most lucrative. One of the best boxing films ever made,
along with Robert Wise's classic film noirish The Set-Up
(1949) starring Robert Ryan as aging boxer Stoker Thompson,
was the realistically stark Body and Soul (1947). It starred
John Garfield as boxer Charlie Davis who 'sold his soul' to unethical
promoters but then had a change of heart in the last three rounds
of a championship fight during which he was supposed to take a
dive. Others included King Vidor's classic The Champ (1931),
an award-winning story of a prizefighter and his young son, Champion
(1949) with Kirk Douglas as the young fighter, the brutal
boxing drama The Harder
They Fall (1956) (Humphrey Bogart's underrated last film
in which he portrayed Eddie Willis - an aging, crooked sportswriter),
Ralph Nelson's Requiem
for a Heavyweight (1962) with Anthony Quinn as punch-drunk,
washed-up professional boxer Louis 'Mountain' Rivera, Martin
Ritt's The Great White
Hope (1970) with James Earl Jones as black boxer Jack Jefferson,
and Karyn Kusama's independent feminist film Girlfight (2000) with
a great performance by Michelle Rodriguez as a struggling Brooklynite
and teenage Latino boxer. David O. Russell's Oscar-winning dramatic
boxing film The Fighter (2010) told about two half-brothers
who were boxers: welterweight "Irish" Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg)
and Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale) - a boxer-turned-trainer who
was plagued by drugs and addiction, but triumphed to lead Mickey
to the world championship. 
Kevin
Costner portrayed a talented pro golfer in Ron Shelton's romantic
sports film Tin Cup (1996). Although
a comedy, Caddyshack (1980) was about an elitist country club
for golf, a mischievous green-destroying gopher, and a crazed groundskeeper
(Bill Murray).