10 Sports Movies To Watch Before Seeing Ben Affleck’s The Way Back

Allow the following ten similar sports films to prepare viewers for what to expect when The Way Back hits Video On Demand sooner than expected.

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Ben Affleck’s latest collaboration with his The Accountant director Gavin O’Connor was a slam-dunk with critics and fans alike before the onslaught of COVID-19 disrupted its box-office potential.

As Jack Cunningham, Affleck shines bright in The Way Back – the story of an alcoholic former basketball star who embarks on coaching his alma matter’s current rag-tag team out of the gutter. Allow the following ten similar sports films to prepare viewers for what to expect when The Way Back hits Video On Demand sooner than expected.

10 Blue Chips

William Friedkin’s 1994 cautionary tale of leadership gone too far condemns competitive sport for its dark side while recognizing the good it can do as a community-builder.

What it also shares with The Way Back: a haunted protagonist who has lost his wife, his soul and his hold over the sport of basketball. A flawed-but-lovable coach (Affleck in The Way Back, Nick Nolte in Blue Chips) who wants to rally the team together as his only form of therapeutic recourse, but refuses to acknowledge the consequences of his toxic self.. until he does.

Available for stream on: Amazon Prime Video

9 Hardball

From Varsity Blues director Brian Robbins comes another humor-filled sports dramedy. 2002’s Hardball follows the unlikely bond formed between a degenerate gambler and the struggling, inner-city youth baseball team he has agreed to coach in order to pay off his debts.

As is the case with The Way Back, the film’s emotional beats stun and marvel. Moreover, they each reflect the formula needed for a resonate sports world-set move: ultimately, the better ones are sometimes less about sports and more about family. Specifically, a family who recognizes they are their best selves as a unit – and thus must come together to overcome the adversity they have been unfairly dealt.

Available for stream on: STARZ

8 Miracle

What is an effective sports movie, if not the story of an underdog pulling off the unthinkable? Gavin O’Connor’s first foray into the gutwrenching sports drama genre has been a must-see for sports fans everywhere since its theatrical release in 2004.

Miracle follows Herb Brooks’ (played by Kurt Russell) on his true-life journey leading the U.S. Olympic hockey team to victory over the heavily-favored Soviet squad in 1980. Like The Way Back, the film zeroes in on how a coach in their ultra-determined mode can compromise all else in their personal life to help guide their players to the promised land.

Available for stream on: Disney +

7 Eight Crazy Nights

Adam Sandler and co.’s 2002 ode to classic animated holiday movies quickly became a hit during the DVD boom. With two hours of laughs squeezed into its lightning-fast 1hr 16min. run time, one could easily forget just how many thematically evocative cooks were in its Happy Madison-heavy kitchen.

Catchy musical numbers and potty humor aside, Eight Crazy Nights covers the road to redemption for a former local youth basketball star-turned-town drunk whose life was completely undone by an unspeakable tragedy. Forced to become a volunteer referee to meet his court-mandated community service requirements, Sandler’s Davey Stone is the generous-yet-tormented type who would eject Ben Affleck’s rage-filled Jack Cunningham from a game then buy him a few rounds afterward.

6 The Mighty Ducks

A DUI arrest also turned out to be the best thing to happen to former hockey star Gordon Bombay (played by Emilio Estevez), whose life was down-spiraling until becoming the court-mandated coach of the franchise-spanning youth hockey team in 1992.

With a reboot on the way, refreshing one’s self with the beloved band of Ducks players is a perfect way to pass the time through this, the season of curve-flattening quarantines. Plus, The Way Back is heading to Video On Demand early as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, according to this Variety report. So those in search of a modern-day update of the “down-on-their-luck has-been becoming a youth sports coach” genre are plenty in luck.

Available for stream on: Disney +

5 Off The Black

This hidden gem-of-a-feature debut from James Ponsoldt (The Spectacular Now, The End of the Tour) is the second film in the unofficial “Nick Nolte sports trilogy.” It is also undoubtedly the most underseen of the three.

2006’s Off The Black peels back the layers of a professionally and personally guarded youth baseball umpire (played by Nolte) who strikes up a friendship with the revenge-seeking high school pitcher who tee-peed his house. Nolte’s Ray Cook and his drunken exploits are woven in mystery until the audience learns the origin of his heartache. Plot points that carry over to Affleck’s tour-de-performance in The Way Back.

Available for stream on: Amazon Prime Video

4 The Wrestler

Due to a health scare, Mickey Rourke’s “Randy The Ram” in The Wrestler learns he must retire from the sport that has become his sole identity and purpose. Over the course of Darren Aronofsky’s acclaimed 2008 film, he struggles to acclimate to a life lived without entrance music.

The existential dread stirring within him is something viewers of The Way Back will attest that Ben Affleck’s Jack Cunningham replicates whole-heartedly. While Randy “The Ram” is a has-been athlete coming to grips with the reality he should have retired from event-based fighting long ago, Affleck’s Cunningham is someone who gave up basketball prematurely because he did not think he needed it. Upon his return in a coaching capacity, he realizes that – like Randy the Ram’s devotion to the ring – he always needed the court to feel alive. And will continue to rely on it, even if it kills him.

3 Hoosiers

The 1986 basketball drama starring Gene Hackman and Dennis Hopper regularly tops many all-time sports movie rankings. Rightfully so, as the film – not dissimilarly to The Way Back – dares to push the interweaving pursuits of victory and redemption to their absolute breaking point(s).

While Hackman’s assistant coach in Hopper is who suffers from crippling alcohol addiction in Hoosiers, Affleck’s Jack Cunningham takes on the burden of both (Hoosiers leads), with many applauding Affleck’s ability to draw from his own divorce and addiction as research to carry an otherwise formulaic story. In The Way Back, Affleck is one-part booze-reliant (Hooper), and two-parts only given-the-benefit-of-the-doubt for so long before those facilitating his comeback contemplate pulling the plug (Hackman).

2 Warrior

Talk about sports movies that are more than sports. The final installment in the unofficial “Nick Nolte sports trilogy” (this time seeing the veteran actor in an oscar-nominated supporting turn as an alcoholic neglectful father looking to make amends) pits his estranged sons against each other in an MMA showdown for the ages.

2011’s Warrior spends the bulk of its narrative offering a window into the complexity of brotherly love and generational abandonment. The Way Back does quite the same, supplanting a marriage separation in place of sibling rivalry. By the end of Gavin O’Connor’s second and third legs in his own trilogy of athletics-based dramas, viewers everywhere will forget they were watching a sports movie. For what they experienced instead was a triumph of familial love and the human spirit in the face of cataclysmic loss and despair.

Available for stream on: Amazon Prime Video

1 The Basketball Diaries

An introspective, obsession-based character study where a future Oscar-winner plays a high school basketball star who quickly abandons his most redeeming quality to instead surrender to what numbs him the most. While pegging The Way Back beyond accurately, the same description rang true for The Basketball Diaries a quarter-of-a-century earlier.

While What’s Eating Gilbert Grape was his first Oscar nomination two years prior, a young Leonardo DiCaprio stole the show as a leading man for the first time in 1995’s The Basketball Diaries. Despite the title, the film – an adaptation of Jim Carroll’s memoir-of-the-same-name – checked more boxes in meeting the drug addiction subgenre criteria than it did for the sports drama. Nevertheless, heroin was for DiCaprio’s Jim Carroll what alcohol is for Affleck’s Jack Cunningham: the fuel that keeps him off the court even when he is physically on it.

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