Sports movies are big business, but sometimes a movie concocts a sport that doesn’t even exist. Sci-fi and fantasy movies often create fictional sports to flesh out the worlds of their stories, but other genres also have games which don’t exist in real life. In some cases, a fictional sport can be so compelling that people try to figure out ways to carry it over into the real world. This is what has happened with quidditch from the Harry Potter series and baseketball from the movie of the same name.
Great fictional sports don’t necessarily have to be ones which people would want to see in real life. Sometimes, the opposite is true. A fictional sport should enhance the world and the themes of the story. This could call for overly violent sports to illustrate a dystopian society, such as The Hunger Games or the Transcontinental Road Race in Death Race 2000. Whether a fictional sport is an adaptation of a real-life sport or something more unusual altogether, it needs to serve the story of the movie.
Monsters University shows Mike and Sully in their college days. The prequel focuses on staples of the American college experience such as Greek life and sports, and they combine for one of the movie’s most climactic moments. The competitive scaring event is the culmination of the Scare Games, an intramural tournament to crown the university’s scariest monsters.
Each event of the Scare Games eliminates one team, and competitive scaring is the final. Mike and Sully’s Oozma Kappa fraternity are the underdogs against Roar Omega Roar. Competitors have to enter a mock bedroom and rack up the highest possible score on the scare simulator. They are given information sheets on the children they are supposed to scare, and the competition showcases the different tactics used by the movie’s fun variety of creative creature designs.
Wes Anderson’s movies, whether they are live-action or animated, tend to focus on father-son relationships in some way. The Fantastic Mr. Fox is no exception, as Mr. Fox has to come to terms with the responsibilities of fatherhood rather than continuing to live out his immature fantasies of pulling chicken heists with his friends. When his nephew Kristofferson comes to stay, this heightens the tension between him and his son Ash.
The Whack-Bat scene shows that Kristofferson is naturally talented in every way that Ash can only dream of. The coach explains the ridiculously complex rules of the game, and Kristofferson knocks the flaming pinecone beyond the twig-runners at his first attempt. Whack-Bat looks like a woodland creature’s version of cricket or baseball, but with even more complicated rules and a bizare scoring system which divides everything by nine for some reason.
Top Secret is a great parody of spy movies, but it’s also a hilarious send-up of Elvis Presley’s acting roles. Elvis was such a big name that he could sell movie tickets even if his movies were never as influential or popular as his music. Val Kilmer stars as Nick Rivers, an American rock and roll star who becomes the only man capable of stopping East Germany from carrying out a terrorist attack. It’s exactly the kind of cockamamie plot Elvis was drawn to.
“Skeet Surfing” is Nick Rivers’ hit single, and the music video shows a group of fun-loving young people blasting their shotguns while surfing on a picturesque beach. Rather than lampooning Elvis, the musical style of “Skeet Surfing” is a blatant parody of The Beach Boys. The absurdly dangerous sport shows that, like some members of The Beach Boys, Nick Rivers also has no idea what surfing culture is really like.
Set in the distant future of the year 2000, Death Race 2000 envisions a post-apocalyptic America in which the authoritarian government stages an annual sporting competition to appease the population. The Transcontinental Road Race travels from coast-to-coast, but the competitors are able to win bonus points by running pedestrians down in their weaponized cars.
Each racer adopts a heightened persona and plays up to the crowd like a professional wrestler. The pageantry of the event obscures the reality of the violence. The Resistance fighters in Death Race 2000 are able to see beyond the inane entertainment value, right through to the rotten political system and the celebration of unnecessary violence. The Transcontinental Road Race is marketed as pure entertainment, but like some real-life sports, it requires the audience to ignore the brutal reality.
Motorball is the most popular sport in Iron City, and it could be the only way for cyborgs to enter the prosperous city of Zalem. The sport mixes the thrills of high-speed racing with the carnage of deadly combat, as cyborgs with weaponized attachments duel over possession of a ball on a racing track. Alita finds that she is naturally gifted at motorball, and she needs to be in order to survive the onslaught from her opponents.
Visually, motorball borrows heavily from the 1975 sci-fi movie Rollerball, which in turn is a more violent version of roller derby. Motorball can therefore be described as roller derby played at supersonic speeds with chainsaws, flamethrowers and blades. Alita: Battle Angel 2 could pick up immediately after the events of the first movie, with Alita rising through the ranks as a motorball star.
In the authoritarian dystopia of Panem, the Hunger Games are one way the Capitol exerts its influence on the outer districts. Each district sends two teenage tributes to compete in a battle royale with only one survivor. The organizers of the games keep things entertaining for the pampered citizens of the Capitol by manipulating the arena to force tributes into survival challenges and close combat encounters.
A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes show the Hunger Games in its early years. It gives an interesting alternative view of the Games. In Katniss Everdeen’s time, the Games are an accepted part of life, but the prequel shows how a society can turn toward such a violent practice. The Hunger Games helps explain how bloodsports like Roman gladiator duels can become popular. It would be a horrific event if it ever took place in real life, but history buffs know that it isn’t so far fetched.
Real Steel is based on a concept from a short story written by Richard Matheson in the 1950s, but it has become much more of a possibility in the decades since. There are already TV shows based on robot combat, such as Battlebots and Robot Wars, so it isn’t too much of a stretch to imagine that robot boxing could become a reality in the near future as technology keeps progressing.
The robot boxing featured in Real Steel is bigger and more explosive than anything humans are capable of, but it comes without any of the danger. It’s a combination of human techniques and mechanical power, and this makes for some memorable fight scenes. The Hugh Jackman movie could easily have started a franchise, but director Shawn Levy wasn’t interested in making Real Steel 2.
Matt Stone and Trey Parker haven’t had many acting roles beyond South Park since their show took off in the late 1990s. BASEketball is a rare exception, and it teams them up with David Zucker, the director of comedy classics such as Airplane! and The Naked Gun. BASEketball parodies sports movies, but it’s also a parody of American professional sports in general. Stone and Parker play two friends who invent their own sport free from commercialization and egos.
Baseketball, as the name suggests, is a blend of baseball and basketball. It takes the high-scoring fun of basketball, but it eliminates the need for athletic ability. Baseketball is based on a sport which Zucker and his friends invented in the 1980s, and the movie is all about sticking by friends, even when times get tough. One of the key elements of baseketball is that the defending team can distract the shooter in any way they want. This includes insults, pulling faces, and elaborate mime acts.
Anakin’s reputation as an outstanding pilot begins when he is just a child. By defeating Sebulba in the Boonta Eve Classic, he shows that he has something special, and this continues into his life as a Jedi. The podracing sequence is one of the best moments in the Star Wars prequel trilogy. It’s not the kind of action the franchise is most famous for, but it’s just as thrilling.
Podracing is more like Roman chariot racing than a simple motor race. The sequence borrows heavily from the chariot race in Ben-Hur. Even though The Phantom Menace was released over 40 years later, and is set on an alien planet, the framework and some of the visual language are strikingly similar. This deepens the prequel trilogy’s historical allusions to the rise and fall of the Roman Empire.