Draft Day is a 2014 American sports drama film directed by Ivan Reitman, and starring Kevin Costner and Jennifer Garner.
On the morning of the 2014 NFL Draft, Cleveland Browns general manager Sonny Weaver Jr. must decide how to use the seventh overall pick to improve the team, but he has other problems on his mind.
His semi-secret girlfriend Ali Parker, the team's salary cap analyst, is pregnant, and the recent death of Sonny's father causes tension with his mother.
With his now-restored seventh pick, Sonny appeases Penn and Molina by selecting skilled running back Ray Jennings of Florida State, himself the son of a former Browns player.
As well, a number of NFL players, executives and sportscasters had cameo appearances as themselves, including: Chris Berman, Russ Brandon, Jim Brown, Rich Eisen, Roger Goodell, Jon Gruden, Bernie Kosar, Ray Lewis and Alex Marvez.
Draft Day writers, Rajiv Joseph and Scott Rothman, met while attending graduate school at New York University.
However, things began looking up for Draft Day when director Ivan Reitman contacted the writers and told them he wanted to make their movie.
[3] When the idea was first made public, the film was to be centered on the Buffalo Bills, but the studio subsequently changed it to the Cleveland Browns because of cheaper production costs in Ohio.
Cameos with real-life NFL figures such as league commissioner Roger Goodell and ESPN sportscaster Chris Berman were filmed before and after the draft took place.
Unlike the film, the Browns selected the much-hyped Heisman Trophy winning quarterback, as opposed to passing on Bo Callahan, the fictionalized first pick favorite, although there are unflattering similarities between the two.
The website's consensus reads: "It's perfectly pleasant for sports buffs and Costner fans, but overall, Draft Day lives down to its title by relying too heavily on the sort of by-the-numbers storytelling that only a statistician could love.
Ian Rapoport, an NFL Network Insider who held multiple brief cameos throughout the film, admitted that there are “plenty of things that aren’t exactly the way it goes” within the actual drafting process.
[10] Riley McAtee, writing for The Ringer, noted that the Browns burdened themselves with an additional $7 million in annual salary (as stated by a Seahawks executive in the film) to the fictional Mack – a player who would have been lucky to be drafted 15th overall, compounded by the fact that the Browns have also deprived the fictional Callahan of $7 million in annual salary that he, not Mack, should be making: McAtee also notes the complete ineptness of the fictional executives of the Seahawks and Jaguars, making bad deal after bad deal, calling the latter the equivalent of "a kid who just wet his pants".
Writing for WhatCulture, David Hynes listed it as the 10th best script of the 2010s, arguing that it "follows one of the central tenets of screenwriting which is, 'thou shalt make things as hard as possible for your protagonist'".
Steve Persall from the Tampa Bay Times, remains very opinionated about the shortcomings of the film, claiming that “[t]his movie doesn’t even trust the viewers to know where teams play” as each city is introduced with their relative mascot.
These details are simple to overlook during the production of a multi-million-dollar movie, as Ian Rapoport is recorded sharing his awareness of the film's inaccuracies stating that "Hollywood does its thing".
The film itself is also treated similarly to the NFL Draft, many scenes play like advertisements, with logo after logo being shoved in the viewer’s face, along with loud visuals that “give the viewer the impression they’re watching something truly important.”[19] The NFL Draft provides tens of millions of dollars to first picks,[20] but these large-scale stakes are difficult to convey in a two-hour film.