Sometimes, the lives of world-famous athletes can become the stuff of compelling film and television. In the world of basketball, we’ve seen this through the drama Shooting Stars, about LeBron James’s high school team, and the television show Winning Time, about the Los Angeles Lakers in the 1970s and 1980s. All of which means that it isn’t terribly shocking to hear that a film currently in development would revisit the life of the late Kobe Bryant — or, at least, one aspect of it.
In an article for The Hollywood Reporter, McKinley Franklin and Ryan Gajewski write that Warner Bros. successfully bid for the rights to a screenplay titled With the 8th Pick, written by Alex Sohn and Gavin Johannsen. Their screenplay is said to focus on the 1996 NBA draft, with an emphasis on the New Jersey Nets front office and their decision on whether or not to draft Bryant.
Based on the summary of the film in The Hollywood Reporter‘s article, the best comparison here might be to Air, the acclaimed 2023 film in which a young Michael Jordan plays a crucial role while not being the film’s protagonist. Given the fact that Bryant’s legacy is a lot more complicated than many legendary athletes, it isn’t hard to see why a film with Bryant at the center might focus on an early moment in his career rather than a more traditional biographical route.
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The mural was defaced last weekScreenwriters Sohn and Johannsen each have a number of credits to their name already; THR‘s article on their upcoming basketball film states that a director has yet to be hired for it. That said, if his social media presence is any indication, Johannsen has a deep and abiding love for Los Angeles’s sports teams, suggesting that his interest in this subject came very organically.
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