Everyone loves a winner, baby. Well, a winners’ story anyway. The Rocky formula alone proves that with the movie providing the basis for dozens of movies that followed the ground-breaking release of the Sylvester Stallone classic back in 1976. In fact, the top ten sports movies listed over on the IMDB have brought in a massive $1.9 billion at the global box-office, which is by no means pocket change.
Analysing the sub-genre in more detail, the folks over at Betway have looked at what truly makes a good sports movie, and why audiences connect with it. Films like The Blind Side, which revolves around American football not on brought in a $300+ million at the box-office, but also bagged itself multiple awards too, most notably for Sandra Bullock’s lead performance.
Looking at the top 50 sports films on the IMDB, the site noticed that out of all of them, 27 of the sports listed revolve around an individual, rather than a team. Out of those, 17 are a professional sport, with 9 of the remaining films based on real-life events and 8 of those have a triumphant ending, of course. Out of those eight, three are boxing movies, Cinderella Man, The Fighter and The Hurricane.
Boxing is huge. From the top ten box-office hits in the genre, half of them were boxing movies, and all but one, Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby, were from the extended Rocky franchise.
This shows that audiences really want to connect to a hero that has a compelling story – that he’s up against the odds, and most of all, they want to see him or her succeed. Out of the 31 sports movies in the list that are based on real-life events, 24 have a happy ending.
We all love a good sports movie. The extensive research is even more details and can be viewed at the end of the link above.
