Concussion film faces attention lack
On Monday, Sony Pictures released the trailer for its big December Oscar movie, Concussion, starring Will Smith as Dr. Bennet Omalu, the neuropathologist who discovered chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in the brains of football players who have committed suicide, linking the deadly disease with the United States’ most popular sport.
Omalu featured prominently in Frontline’s scathing documentary about head trauma in football two years ago, League of Denial.
What’s perhaps most fascinating is where Sony released the trailer. It was given exclusively to Peter King, the longtime Sports Illustrated reporter considered the dean of the professional football writers establishment.
King is the author of Monday Morning Quarterback, a must-read column he’s written for nearly two decades. King is so tapped into the NFL establishment he is often criticized for being an NFL mouthpiece, for taking the NFL side on any contentious issue, for being the public face of a football press corps generally considered compliant and beholden to the league it covers.
That Sony handed the trailer to King is a bit of surprise, because the trailer essentially makes the NFL out to be the evil corporation trying to get away with murder.
It plays almost beat-for-- beat like the trailer for Michael Mann’s The Insider, about a 60 Minutes producer (Al Pacino) attempting to force cigarette manufacturers to stop lying about the lethality of their product. It is not the best sign for the NFL that their brand has reached the point that they are now the cigarette manufacturers.
King, a man always aware of his detractors online, seemed to understand the oddity of his site being the first place to show a trailer for a movie that seems set out to destroy the NFL. While it was through King that most Americans first heard about the movie, the NFL has been fully aware for more than a year now.
Back in December, BuzzFeed’s Lindsey Adler, after weeding through documents leaked from the Sony hack, found Sony Pictures already preparing for an NFL attack on its film. The consequence? The NFL will just ignore it, or attempt to find other distractions.
Remember, concussions, domestic violence, and player discipline were all anyone could talk about before the last NFL season, and then the games started, and by midseason, no one was talking about Ray Rice anymore.
I’ve argued before that the NFL will remain immune from bad publicity as long as people keep watching its games in record numbers. And until sports fans reject the game itself, no Will Smith movie about the evils of the league will be able to touch it, either.