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Have y’all sneakerheads ever wanted to see a movie about how Michael Jordan ended up signing with the Nike brand? Well, y’all are about to get your chance to find out.
According to Nice Kicks, childhood buddies turned Hollywood heavyweights, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are once again teaming up to star in a film about Sonny Vaccaro, who was the main catalyst that swayed Air Jordan to sign with the Nike brand instead of his preferred brand at the time, Converse.
Damon will be taking on the role of the aforementioned Nike executive while Affleck will play another famous Nike head honcho, Phil Knight, with both men also taking on writing, directing, and producing duties on the film.
The film will mainly focus on the damn near impossible task that laid before Vaccaro as he had to convince one of the hottest players on the basketball market to sign with a then third-string sneaker brand known as Nike and had to go through his father, mother, and even MJ’s friends in order to convince his Airness to take a chance on the Swoosh brand.
Ultimately he did and the rest is sneaker and marketing history. For anyone who wants to get the inside scoop on how that deal went down, there’s already a documentary out there that they can delve into and enjoy courtesy of ESPN.
ESPN’s 30 for 30 produced Sole Man back in 2015, a documentary on the life and career of Sonny which spans decades and different sneaker brands, which detailed how Vacarro landed big-time basketball players to the respective brands he worked for.
No word on when the film will go into production or who’ll be tackling the role of a young Michael Jordan (that’s what we really wanna know), but it will be interesting to see who the casting directors settle in on when the time comes. Hopefully, they don’t whitewash that role (we kid, we kid).
Are y’all looking forward to Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s upcoming Nike film? Let us know in the comments section below.
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