Kathryn Hahn and Sienna Miller have joined the cast of David O Russell’s biopic about the creation of the John Madden Football videogame series.
If you’re only familiar with the name John Madden because of the long-running Madden NFL series of American football videogames, then fear not: director David O Russell appears to know this. The filmmaker’s currently in the process of making a biopic called Madden that isn’t digging into its subject’s long sporting career, but rather the development of a Sega Mega Drive that bore his name.
Madden will star Nicolas Cage as the retirement-age athlete, who finds himself a fish out of water in the geeky world of late 80s and early 90s game development. It’s now being reported by Deadline that comedian and actor John Mulaney will play Trip Hawkins – the founder of studio and publisher Electronic Arts who managed to convince Madden to lend his name to a football videogame.
Kathryn Hahn will reportedly play Madden’s wife, while Sienna Miller has joined the cast as Carol, the wife of LA Raiders owner Al Davis, played by Christian Bale.
Russell has form when it comes to making true-life dramas with comedic overtones; his last critical success was 2015’s Joy, in which Jennifer Lawrence took the title role as Joy Mangano, inventor of the Miracle Mop. Following the critical and commercial disappointment of 2022’s comedy caper Amsterdam, it sounds as though Russell’s moving back to more familiar territory with Madden – a Blacklist script originally written by Cambron Clark, but said to have been heavily reworked by Russell himself.
Product movies have become an established subgenre since 2015, with the likes of Tetris, Blackberry and Air all mining the origin stories of well-known pieces of merchandise and tech for drama. The story of what became the Madden NFL series is as colourful, potentially, as any of those movies, though. The original game was developed for a console whose success in the US was far from certain, given Nintendo’s dominance in the late 80s.
Hawkins didn’t bother getting a licence from Sega to develop for the Mega Drive (or Genesis), either, which could have landed him in legal hot water. Instead, the resulting game was an unexpected smash, selling multiple times the number of cartridges anticipated, and helping turn EA into the publishing behemoth it is today.
Exactly how deeply Madden will delve into the nerdy details of game development remains to be seen. If nothing else, it’ll be fascinating to see Nicolas Cage tapping away on a Mega Drive controller.
More on Madden as it comes in.
