Glen Powell is coming for your heart again. This time, he’s playing Lou Gehrig.
Universal Pictures is putting together a film about the Yankees legend with Powell attached to star and Richard Linklater directing. Deadline broke the news. The project marks another Linklater-Powell collaboration after Hit Man, Fast Food Nation, and Everybody Wants Some! That last one? Also about baseball. So the guys clearly have a thing for the sport.
What’s interesting here is the producer lineup. Lorne Michaels, the guy behind Saturday Night Live and a lifelong Yankees fan, is producing alongside Erin David under Broadway Video. Broadway Video has a first-look deal at Universal. Linklater is also in talks to produce through his Detour Filmproduction. And Simon Rich, a former SNL writer, is penning the script. That’s a weird and probably great mix — the guy who makes Barbie and Hit Man and the guy who makes The Lonely Island and Man Seeking Woman teaming up for a baseball tragedy.
There’s no release date yet. No production start date either. Powell has been working nonstop for the last year, so he’s reportedly planning to take a break before diving into this. That could mean we won’t see this thing for a while.
We also don’t know if this will be a straight biopic or something more unconventional. The only other major film about Gehrig is the 1942 classic The Pride of the Yankees with Gary Cooper. That one set the standard. This one has room to do something different.
One detail that slipped out: Babe Dahlgren, the guy who replaced Gehrig at first base when the streak ended, is expected to have a significant role in the film. No casting news yet on that front, but Deadline speculates it’ll be a highly sought-after part. Dahlgren stepped into the lineup on May 2, 1939, after Gehrig pulled himself out of the game. That was the day the streak ended at 2,130. And then Gehrig never played again.
Gehrig played 17 seasons with the Yankees from 1923 to 1939. Six World Series rings. Seven All-Star appearances. Two AL MVPs (1927 and 1936). A Triple Crown in 1934. He died two years after retiring, at age 37, from complications related to ALS. The disease is now commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.
Powell is coming off a massive run with Top Gun: Maverick, Anyone But You, and Twisters. Linklater is Linklater — never predictable. A Powell-Linklater Gehrig movie with Lorne Michaels producing? That’s not a sentence anyone saw coming, but it feels like it could be something special.
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