Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are to reunite for a movie about the sportswear company Nike.
Affleck is directing the as-yet-untitled drama for Amazon Studios, Skydance Sports and Mandalay Pictures.
The movie will tell the remarkable story of how Sonny Vaccaro (Damon), a sneaker salesman, led Nike’s pursuit of the basketball icon Michael Jordan.
Ben, 49, will play the Nike co-founder Phil Knight in the story surrounding the company’s attempts to sign Jordan to its shoe firm in the mid-1980s – an endorsement that seemed unlikely at the time but would go on to become the most significant relationship between an athletic brand and a sportsperson and launched the multibillion-dollar sneaker industry.
Sonny’s attempts to sign Jordan to what was then the third-place shoe company takes him to the sports star’s parents – particularly his powerful and dynamic mother.
Jordan is a giant mythic figure above the movie and is never seen as Sonny tries to reach him by gaining access to his entourage.
Alex Convery wrote the original script, titled ‘Air Jordan’, for the story and it was named on the 2021 Black List of the best unproduced screenplays. Ben and Matt are doing a new pass on the script and will produce the flick.
Affleck and Damon have worked together on films such as ‘Good Will Hunting’ and ‘The Last Duel’ and the latter believes their writing process is now far more efficient than earlier in their careers.
Matt, 51, recalled: “I think that writing process for ‘Good Will Hunting’ was so inefficient.
“You know, because we didn’t really understand structure so we wrote thousands of pages. … We’d be like, ‘Well, what if this happened?,’ and then we’d just write different scenes. So, we had all these kind of disparate scenes and then we kind of tried to jam them together into something that looked like a movie.”
