Glen Powell is about to step into the cleats of baseball’s original “luckiest man.”
“Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth,” Lou Gehrig told the crowd at Yankee Stadium on July 4, 1939, weeks after his ALS diagnosis forced him out of the game. Powell will now bring that story to a new generation in an untitled Universal Pictures biopic about the Yankees legend.
The Hollywood Reporter confirmed the casting on July 22, with Richard Linklater set to direct and Simon Rich — a longtime SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE writer whose Sam Altman movie ARTIFICIAL is due later this year — penning the script. Deadline broke the news first.
Producers include Lorne Michaels and Erin David for Broadway Video, working through its first-look deal at Universal. Powell will also produce under his Barnstorm banner’s first-look deal at the studio, and Linklater is in talks to produce through Detour Filmproduction.
The project reunites two collaborators with real chemistry. Powell first worked with Linklater in 2016’s EVERYBODY WANTS SOME!!, playing a college baseball player, and the two later co-wrote 2023’s Netflix hit HIT MAN.
Gehrig is the sort of subject who arrives with a built-in redemptive arc. He anchored first base for the Yankees’ famed 1927 “Murderers’ Row” lineup alongside Babe Ruth, earned the nickname “The Iron Horse” for playing 2,130 consecutive games and was later voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
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He died in 1941 at just 37, the disease that took him now known widely as Lou Gehrig’s disease.
His farewell speech remains one of the most quoted moments in American sports. “I’ve been given a bad break,” Gehrig said that afternoon, “but I’ve got an awful lot to live for.”
The line has been held up ever since as a picture of gratitude in the face of suffering — the kind of story Hollywood doesn’t make very often anymore.
Gary Cooper earned a Best Actor nomination for playing Gehrig in 1942’s Oscar-winning THE PRIDE OF THE YANKEES, still considered one of the finest sports movies ever made. Anyone taking on the role now takes on more than a baseball legend — it’s a story of character, faithfulness in marriage, and dignity under a death sentence.
Powell has become one of Hollywood’s most in-demand leading men, as Movieguide® has previously reported in coverage of his mentorship under Tom Cruise on TOP GUN: MAVERICK. He’s also talked openly about the “reverence” — his word — he brings to working with filmmakers he admires, a mindset that will serve him well for a story this weighty.
Next up, Powell stars in Judd Apatow’s THE COMEBACK KING for Universal early next year, followed by J.J. Abrams’ THE GREAT BEYOND opposite Jenna Ortega at Warner Bros. He’s also reprising his role in the second season of Hulu’s football comedy CHAD POWERS.
Linklater, meanwhile, has been on a tear. He directed both 2025’s BLUE MOON and NOUVELLE VAGUE — a filmmaker who tends to treat his subjects with warmth rather than cynicism, which is exactly what a Gehrig story needs.
No release date is set. But if the movie captures even a fraction of what made Gehrig’s farewell speech land the way it did, families may finally have a modern baseball movie worth cheering for.
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