The Express: A Star Football Movie?

Why this year's pigskin flick from Universal about Ernie Davis, the first African American Heisman winner, could score at the box office

By Ronald Grover

It's football season again. Hollywood's local team, the University of Southern California, is again mopping up the field with the opposition. Grizzled veteran quarterback Brett Favre is flinging the pigskin all over a new stadium. And Hollywood is once again looking for the end zone. Each season, it seems, studios tempt the football gods with a pigskin theme. This year's entry is called The Express, a Universal (GE) film that retells the story of 1960s superstar Syracuse running back Ernie Davis, who became the first African American Heisman Trophy winner but died of leukemia before he ever played a professional game.

Will it be a huge hit? Probably not. The history of Hollywood football films is that few ever approach $100 million territory, Hollywood's own version of the Super Bowl. Indeed, the only triple-digit gridiron movie I could find was the 2000 Disney (DIS) film Remember the Titans, which needed superstar actor Denzel Washington in the lead and Disney's muscular marketing machine to get into that particular end zone. But even with Denzel, that film didn't exactly knock 'em dead overseas, where Hollywood films usually need to clean up to turn a profit.

So what prompted John Davis, one of Hollywood's most prolific producers and a man who knows his way around a blockbuster (the 2004 Will Smith sci-fi flick I, Robot, among others) to take on a subject that has iffy prospects outside America? For starters, The Express, like Remember the Titans, is a story of high school racism overcome that "has real heart, and a subject that will inspire," says Davis. And, heartstrings aside, football films tend to do outsize business on DVD, he says.

Coach Dennis Quaid

Still, this is no easy play for Davis. Fox (NWS), where he has a first-look deal for his movies, passed on the project. ("It isn't their kind of movie," Davis says.) The film is scheduled to be released Oct. 10.

I have a feeling about this one. No, Denzel Washington isn't blowing the whistle in this film. (That chore is handled by the somewhat less bankable Dennis Quaid, who plays Syracuse's trailblazing coach Ben Schwartzwalder.) But if you've been to the movie theater of late, it's hard to miss the wall-to-wall trailers for The Express. On top of that, Universal, which made a nice-size hit ($61 million) out of the high school football drama Friday Night Lights, is flexing its own marketing muscles for this one as well.

Universal's sister company, NBC, has pulled some strings with the National Football League, which has its Sunday night games televised by the network. With the film in mind, the league scheduled the Sept. 14 Pittsburgh-Cleveland game (Davis was drafted by Cleveland, but never played) for NBC to help promote the flick. Quaid stepped onto the field for the traditional coin flip to start the game with Cleveland football legend Jim Brown, Davis' friend and a consultant for the film. Bob Costas did an Ernie Davis feature before the game, and all 32 NFL teams have been showing the film for kids in their area. "We screened the sprockets off that film," says Universal marketing chief Adam Fogelson, who says the studio used its Friday Night Lights mailing list and invited players from high schools around the country to screenings. "We're counting on the world of mouth for a film that everyone seems to really love."

Profitable If Not Gigantic

Still, if recent history is any guide, The Express might equal Friday Night's $61 million, or it could find itself in the $43 million category reached by Warner Bros. (TWX) in the 2006 flick We Are Marshall. That will make this a profitable, if not gigantic, flick. Davis kept production costs under $40 million (again, no Denzel-caliber star), and the script was written to maintain it as a PG flick, which would give it a shot at the heavy weekend kiddy market.

Part of the game plan was making the film less a football highlights flick, and to give it more heart. After director Gary Fleder came aboard, he said he made the script less about football and more about Davis' fight against racism while playing against teams in Texas and elsewhere. Fleder said the script changed after he read a 1989 Sports Illustrated piece on Davis that put the football players' struggles in the context of the civil rights movement. Fleder also says he spent time with Brown, a former Syracuse running back who mentored Davis.

In the end, like any football player who has ever laced up his cleats, The Express will have to perform before the crowd that pays to see the action. Davis says that test screenings have been strong. And I suspect there will be plenty in it for football fans like me. But will it cross over? Will the wife or daughter be warmed enough by Davis' fight against racism to overcome the grunts and blindside tackles? Dunno. But like a starting running back new to the team, this one's got potential.

Grover is Los Angeles bureau chief for BusinessWeek.