What do the movies like Space Jam, Jerry Maguire and Rocky have in common other than the fact that they are starring A-list actors and athletes? All three had great success at the box office earning hundreds of millions of dollars each and they are all sports movies.
           
There are more than 4,000 movies about sports according to IMDB. Many of them have had great success with the critics and at the box office, grossing hundreds of millions of dollars. All these movies explore different sides of a sport. There are biographies such as Ali (starring Will Smith), comedies such as Major League (starring Charlie Sheen) and drama such as Cinderella Man (starring Russell Crowe and Renée Zelwegger).

No matter the age and the level of interest in sports, audiences around the world love a good sports movie. A great storyteller can make us relate and root for a character we know nothing about and eventually entice us to follow that character’s journey until the end. A great movie will capture the audience’s imagination while showing the level of determination and courage it took for a character to reach its full potential. Not all sports movies end with a victory though but it’s the journey that matters. Just as in online casino, there is always someone leaving with the jackpot and another leaving with nothing.

How many people have tried ski jumping once in their lifetime? Probably not many. It doesn’t matter. Released in 2015, Eddie the Eagle, starring Hugh Jackman and Taron Egerton, was critically acclaimed and with good reason. It was a compelling story. Eddie Edwards, a  tenacious British skier has one dream; going to the Winter Olympics… as an athlete. Far from a talented skier, he chooses the one sport with the least competition: ski jumping. With the help of his mentor, played by Mr. Jackman, Eddie follows his dream to the end. That film has all the recipes of a great sports movie. Like Rocky and  Moneyball, it is a David versus Goliath story and it is also based on true events.

Sports movies have this capacity to inspire audiences with impressive action scenes and fascinating stories the way few movie genres can. In a good story, the sport becomes a metaphor of life like in The Warrior (starring Tom Hardy), 42 (starring Chadwick Boseman), or The Legend of Bagger Vance (starring Will Smith and Matt Damon). The real story in a movie is what the athlete or the team is going through and how they will reach their goal.

Everyone who follows sports knows that there can be a lot of conflict and drama during a game, a tournament or a season that can alter an athlete or a team’s performance. And that is perfect for cinema. A character can get injured, traded, be in the middle of a contractual dispute… There are endless sources of possible conflicts. It’s how the team or the athlete bounces back and reacts to adversity that makes a story worth telling. The win or loss becomes secondary.

Many of us are fascinated by athletes. They are a different species. They spend their lives working towards one goal and one goal only; winning. With such high expectations, there comes a lot of pressure, internally and externally. They train hard, diet hard, compete and do it all over again. And the best athletes are never fully satisfied with their performances. They will always say that they need to improve one aspect of their game. That obsession in itself can lead to many sacrifices, compromises and conflict with the outside world.

So what is the best sports movie of all time? There are many great ones that have had both critical acclaim and commercial success. However, with more than a billion dollar earned at the box office and still relevant four decades later, it has to be Rocky. The story of Rocky Balboa played by the legendary Sylvester Stallone is a great inspiring story that everyone can relate to no matter the level of interest in boxing. That film had such great success that it became a franchise and after Rocky retired, Stallone had the brilliant idea of starting the Creed franchise.

The Rocky movies contain stories that have been told countless times already in many other films and many other genres but it’s a story we can never get tired of watching. Some will go so far as to say that these movies represent the American dream at its core. It’s a rags to riches tale and Stallone understood that. Stallone knew that sometimes we all wish we would have Rocky Balboa’s strength and courage to reach our dreams and not let anyone distract us on our way there.