Special Report

Best Sports Movies to Watch While You're Waiting for Pro Sports to Return

The global coronavirus pandemic has shaken the sports world like nothing else in recent history. Major events from the Summer Olympics and Wimbledon to professional sports like hockey and baseball have been canceled or postponed. Though fans can’t watch their favorite sports, they can still watch movies about them.

In some good news for millions of Americans, Major League Baseball is giving fans some hope. Players and owners are negotiating and may start the new seasons, albeit a shortened one, around mid-July. There are some highly praised movies about America’s favorite pastime that some people may want to see in the meantime.

24/7 Tempo created an index of several measures, including the average critic rating and average audience rating Rotten Tomatoes as well as the Internet Movie Database average user rating, to compile a list of the 25 best sports movies now available for streaming.

If your sport still hasn’t resumed by the time you’re done with the movie binge, you may want to find a new pastime. There are competitions that are extremely popular elsewhere in the world, but the typical American likely doesn’t know about them – these are 20 sports most Americans have never heard of.

Click here to see the best sports movies to watch while you’re waiting for pro sports to return.

To determine the best sports movies available to stream, 24/7 Tempo created an index based on each feature film’s Rotten Tomatoes average critic rating, Rotten Tomatoes average audience rating, and Internet Movie Database average user rating. To be considered, each film needed to be categorized as “sport” by IMDb, have at least 5,000 user ratings on IMDb, and at least 10 Rotten Tomatoes critic reviews.

We averaged the user ratings from Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb and weighted by the number of votes for each. The combined user rating was then averaged with the Rotten Tomatoes critic rating. Editorial discretion was used to remove titles that were deemed insufficiently related to sports.

Each film was available for streaming on at least one platform as of June 22, 2020, based on data from website JustWatch.

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