Richard Linklater And Glen Powell To Reteam On Lou Gehrig Baseball Biopic At Universal

Considering it’s the American national pastime, baseball has been subject to surprisingly few cinematic home runs. For every Bad News Bears, Bull Durham, or A League Of Their Own there’s also a Rookie Of The Year, The Benchwarmers, or Bad News Bears remake. But as Deadline reports, the director of that last movie, one Richard Linklater, is looking to raise baseball’s big-screen batting average with a new biopic about New York Yankees’ legendary first baseman Lou Gehrig. And what’s more, Linklater has already found the film’s Iron Horse: his Everybody Wants Some!! and Hit Man star Glen Powell.

Despite being one of the most iconic sportspeople of all time, Lou Gehrig — who made a staggering 2,130 consecutive appearances for the Yankees, winning six World Series titles before being diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (also known as ALS, MND, and, formerly, Lou Gehrig’s disease) in 1939 — has only actually been the subject of one major movie to date: Gary Cooper starrer Pride Of The Yankees, released just a year after Gehrig’s untimely death in 1941. Linklater’s film then is set to pull out all the stops to do the great man justice.

Lifelong Yankee fan — and SNL mastermind — Lorne Michaels is aboard to produce the Universal picture, with Linklater (whose Nouvelle Vague has already stormed into our best movies of 2026) set to direct from a script by SNL alum and An American Pickle writer Simon Rich. Powell meanwhile is coming off the back of charming audiences in Hulu comedy sports series Chad Powers, which has already been renewed for — and wrapped shooting on — its second season. And, of course, Powell is no stranger to playing a baseball player in a Richard Linklater joint, having played Everybody Wants Some!!‘s college team veteran Walt ‘Finn’ Finnegan (not that Powell got a hell of a lot of baseball playing done in that film.)

While specifics in terms of the time period and central focus of Linklater and Powell’s Lou Gehrig movie are unknown at this point, it is believed that Babe Dahlgren — the man tasked with replacing Gehrig at first base following Lou’s shock early retirement — will play a pivotal role in the movie. However the director-star duo go about telling this story, you can rest assured they’ll take a big swing to deliver a hit worthy of their subject. Watch this space for more updates as the project takes shape!