The only thing I could think of is that would derail this is maybe the girls on the team were assaulted or abused in some way and it was hushed up.
“Set in 1984, the movie was supposed to be about the true story of a girls soccer team that went to China to compete in an international tournament and went on to defeat several major teams and ultimately win the tournament, with Matthew McConaughey playing their coach Bill Kinder.
The Deadline story also goes deeper in the plot, saying it would’ve tied in with Ronald Reagan’s attempts to reestablish political relations with China, which led to China inviting the U.S. women’s soccer team to attend a big tournament, which led to the U.S. realizing that it didn’t have a women’s soccer team. Thus, a bunch of teenagers got called up to compete”
Any soccer fans know anything about the original team and coach?
I don’t know the story and the team this film is based on, but it reminded of the true story when in 1981, the German club team SSG Bergisch Gladbach 09 won the first (unofficial) World Cup for women in Taiwan. Surprisingly, the great football nation Germany still didn’t have an official women’s national team, so they sent the current German champion which was Bergisch Gladbach. All their competitors were real national selections of the respective nations’ best players. And as the story goes, Bergisch Gladbach won and a club team became the first women’s World Cup champion.
Multiple sources have said the problem is either the veracity of the story told regarding the original events, or things previously undisclosed about those events.
It says right there in the article that the move was canceled based on, “allegations surrounding aspects of the true story on which the drama was based.” Production had not even begun.
I can’t think of an analogous situation off hand, but movies get canceled at various points in development for various reasons all the time. It’s certainly possible other projects have been halted for similar reasons with less fanfare.
No kidding. What a wild, unsubstantiated aspersion to cast based on a lazy reading of the article.
Geeze, you all bored or what? It was one comment, based on both not reading the article, and knowing how it is in Hollywood, but y’all gotta get your kicks in. Move on already.
Nobody else is thinking China had anything to do with it? China is a huge film market for Hollywood and they have had increasing influence on marketing and production of films. If this portrayed them in a bad light China may have threatened to bar the production company and distributors from their market.
Agreed. @Just_Asking_Questions , if you have any citations to support your aspersion against Matthew McConaughey, you should present them, and if you don’t have any, you should learn to keep your mouth shut. That is a serious accusation.
Yeah, the film not have been “Pro-China” enough and gotten canned after they couldn’t secure a Chinese co-production company willing to work with them.
Yeah, there’s many ways this movie could have inadvertently made China look bad. Either something about CCP politics, or making China look backwards, or whatnot.
China is a major market…but is it really a major market for a feel-good lower-tier American sports movie?
Very realistically the aspects of the story that have come to light probably just made money people involved say “the juice ain’t for the squeeze” for all the hit/think pieces that will get written about it and bog down any publicity the movie gets.
That’s not really the issue. If China feels insulted by a movie, they may decide they don’t want to do business with any company involved in making it, whether it makes it to their market or not. My suspicion is the head honchos involved want to keep the gravy train rolling in for other movies they plan to release in the Chinese market, and don’t want to risk upsetting the boat. There are memes about “Cancel culture” here in the USA, but China really takes it to a whole new level.