Before Air Jordan came around, Nike wasn’t always so synonymous with basketball. The company’s rise from fledgling sneaker brand to one of the biggest names in athletics — with some help from a rookie named Michael Jordan — is the subject of the upcoming Ben Affleck-directed AIR, and you can see its official trailer today ahead of its theatrical premiere April 5th.
Matt Damon stars as Sonny Vaccaro, a Nike employee tasked with helping to grow the company’s feeble basketball division. His idea is to put a face to the name — but who’d collaborate with a brand as uncool as Nike was in the early 1980s? Sonny then finds the ideal partner in a newcomer, Michael, who’d go on to become the sport’s greatest player of all time, revolutionizing the sneaker world in the process.
“We build a shoe line around just him,” Sonny tells his supervisors, before eventually landing on its now-iconic title: Air Jordan, the best basketball shoes in the world. Watch the trailer for AIR below.
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AIR also stars Affleck alongside Jason Bateman, Chris Messina, Marlon Wayans, Chris Tucker, and Viola Davis. Until it comes out in April, you can revisit some of Damon’s best roles thanks to our list of his top 10 performances.
