Will Ferrell to Play John Madden In David O. Russell Movie About Madden NFL Video Game Series

Will Ferrell is set to play NFL Coach John Madden in a new biopic movie about how Madden got involved in creating the mega-hit Madden NFL video game series. The Amazon/MGM film is titled Madden, and it will be based on a script by Cambron Clark, which was included as part of last year’s Hollywood Black List of highly-coveted unproduced scripts. Todd Black will produce the film for Escape Artists. 

The story of Madden reportedly follows John Madden after his retirement from the NFL, when he met the team at Electronic Arts and created an NFL football simulation game that would go on to become synonymous with the sports league, and one of the biggest franchises in gaming. 

Electronic Arts founder Trip Hawkins will be another major character in the story; Hawkins was a prodigy who created his own paper-and-dice football game as a child and hoped to one day have a computerized version of the game. He played college football for the Harvard Crimson and studied computing, developing a game for early computers. He founded Electronic Arts in 1982 in order to realize the dream of taking the paper and dice games of his youth and turn them into computer games. In 1984 he approached John Madden; Hawkins, Madden, and game producer Joe Ybarra then took a two-day Amtrak train ride (Madden was scared to fly) where they hammered out the core concept for the Madden NFL game. 

However, Madden (and all his big personality) would take a more active role in planning and designing the game than Hawkins or the teams at EA ever imagined – it kicked off an intense and difficult process of getting the game made in a way that brought the “realness” of the NFL to personal computers. Even after John Madden Football debuted in 1988 (on Apple II computers), it wouldn’t be until later in the early 1990s with the breakthrough of console gaming that the series would finally solidify its place as a dominant force in gaming, and scale-tipping force in early console wars. 

John Madden remained a colorful (to put it mildly) figure all throughout the hard road to success for the Madden NFL games – which is why the casting of Will Ferrell makes sense. Madden is still making headlines to this day for his commentary about the games, which he still views as a teaching tool for football players, coaches, fans, and analysts everywhere. He’s not wrong: even the way NFL games are broadcast now has changed due to Madden NFL games. 

David O. Russell’s Madden movie is now in development.   

Source: Deadline