Connecting with the ball

The underdog is back.

That tried-and-true staple of sports-themed films resurfaced this weekend with the premieres of Charles Stone III’s “Mr. 3000” and “Wimbledon,” directed by Richard Loncraine.

In the former, a paunchy, aging baseball star (Bernie Mac) returns to the diamond after a review shows that three of his 3,000 career hits were mistakenly counted twice. In the latter, a past-his-prime veteran tennis player (Paul Bettany) gets a wild-card berth at the Wimbledon championships and tries to win the heart of a rising international star (Kirsten Dunst), the “bad girl” of the tennis set.

In true underdog fashion, neither came out of the gates very strongly. “Mr. 3000” registered North American ticket sales of $9.2 million while “Wimbledon” garnered $7.8 million.

Joining these two on Oct. 8: Peter Berg’s “Friday Night Lights,” a movie based on the real-life story of a small-town Texas football team vying for its fifth state championship.

According to the box-office tracking firm Exhibitor Relations, the playing field has been fertile ground for box office success this year. “Miracle,” the tale of the victorious 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team, took in $64.3 million, while the comedy “DodgeBall: A True Underdog Story,” collected $113.7 million this summer.

In the documentary realm, the surfing film “Riding Giants” is performing well, with $2 million in ticket sales, and Imax’s “NASCAR” has passed the $18-million mark.

“Sports-themed movies do well if the physical action is a framing device for comedy -- as in ‘A League of Their Own’ -- or behind-the-scenes drama, for which ‘Rocky’ is a paradigm,” said Exhibitor Relations President Paul Dergarabedian. “And you could argue that because some sports are commensurate with patriotism they might play better during tough times.”

Portraying a struggle in which there’s a winner and a loser, moreover, is inherently dramatic, observes Roger Birnbaum (1994’s “Angels in the Outfield”), co-chief executive of Spyglass Entertainment and a producer, along with Gary Barber and Maggie Wilde, of “Mr. 3000.”

Still, “Mr. 3000,” originally slated to star Richard Gere, was more than a decade in the making.

“You start out one foot in a hole when you bring a sports-movie script to a studio, because they generally don’t travel overseas,” said Birnbaum, a former production chief at 20th Century Fox. “Comedies are easier to sell than dramas. When Disney realized they could have a Bernie Mac comedy, they felt they could market it more easily.”

The filmmakers maintain that “Mr. 3000” is ultimately a romantic comedy with an accept-your-older-self baby-boomer message, one that has helped the film move beyond the core male demographic.

“This is a coming-of-age story about a 47-year-old,” notes director Stone, whose last film, the critically acclaimed “Drumline,” also was sports related. “Adults are the target audience and we’ve had good response on the female side. Our challenge is getting teenage males to show up because they’re the ones ... expecting back-to-back humor.”

Producer Brian Grazer (“Apollo 13”) also sees crossover appeal in Berg’s “Friday Night Lights.” People respond to the notion of reaching inside themselves to excel -- honing their self-identity in the process, he explains. In this case, a team impoverished educationally and economically is engaged in a wrestling match between reality and hope -- a tale recounted in a H.G. Bissinger’s book of the same name, which Sports Illustrated called one of the five greatest sports stories ever.

“Because every movie has to be distilled to 15 or 30 seconds on television, we’ll have to find a sticky message that will probably be directed more to guys,” said Grazer, who just finished a boxing film called “Cinderella.” “But women are really taken with this film, responding to the male vulnerability.”

While Grazer is an avid surfer, Loncraine (“The Gathering Storm”) doesn’t particularly care for sports himself.

Though he approached “Wimbledon” as a love story, he knew the tennis had to be right. More than half of the 24-week shoot was spent filming the on-court action, though those scenes made up only 40 minutes of the film. The first movie in more than 20 years to be filmed at the venerable tennis club, it features cameos by Chris Evert, Mary Carillo and John McEnroe.

With experts like that on the sidelines, he says, the pressure was considerable.

“It was my arrogance thinking I could take three actors who’d never played tennis and make them look like Wimbledon champions,” Loncraine said. “And though I can’t catch a ball to save my life, I had to make sure the actors knew how to take one from a ball boy or girl with quiet confidence. It’s like training an actor to be Italian -- conveying not just the language but the hand movements.”

Making such simple shots appear genuine is trickier than it would seem, he said, because the mind’s eye can immediately detect a ball that takes an unnatural bounce. As a result, he added: “It’s far easier to make a movie about a monster from space than one about a bouncing ball.”

In the end, computer graphics saved the day -- ensuring that each ball landed inside the lines, converting 400 extras into a sold-out crowd. There were 286 special-effects shots in the tennis sequences alone.

“I was shooting two films -- a sports movie and a romance -- which was very draining,” Loncraine said. “With 600 TV commercials to my credit, I approached it as MTV meets a Nike ad.... This was the most difficult picture I’ve made.”

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Box Office

Preliminary results (in millions) based on studio projections.

*--* Movie 3-day gross Total Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow $16.2 $16.2

Mr. 3000 $9.2 $9.2

Resident Evil: Apocalypse $9 $37.4

Wimbledon $7.8 $7.8

Cellular $6.9 $19.8

Without a Paddle $3.7 $50.4

Hero $3 $46.2

Napoleon Dynamite $2.4 $33.5

Collateral $2.4 $96.1

The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement $2 $92

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Source: Nielsen EDI Inc.