Tom Hanks Is Set to Star in New Baseball Movie THE COMEBACKER
Seven years is a long time in Hollywood. Long enough to forget a lot of things, apparently, but not long enough for Tom Hanks and Marielle Heller to forget how well they work together. They previously worked together on A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.
The two are plotting a reunion project, and it isn't just any reunion project. According to Variety, Hanks is set to star in The Comebacker, a baseball dramedy adapted from a short story by Pulitzer Prize finalist Dave Eggers, with Heller attached to direct.
Both will produce through their respective companies, and studios are already fighting over who gets to write the check.
Sony Pictures is reportedly leading the pack in acquisition talks, which makes a certain kind of sense given that they also released their first collaboration together, the Oscar-nominated A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, back in 2019.
The source material comes from Eggers' story collection The Forgetters, of which The Comebacker is the opening entry. Eggers' work has already found its way to Hanks twice before, through A Hologram for the King and The Circle. Clearly, these two have a creative wavelength that keeps drawing them back to each other.
The story itself centers on a fading sports journalist named Lionel, a man whose fire for both his craft and his life has gone cold. That changes when a pitcher gets called up from the minor leagues, someone who suffered a severe injury years earlier when a batter sent the ball back with enough force to strike his skull.
The comebacker, as it's called, left the pitcher with some unusual aftereffects, including a habit of speaking in a kind of unintentional poetry. The stories Lionel writes about him start resonating with readers in ways he hasn't seen in years.
It will be a film about reinvention, whether you're a pitcher, a writer, or a man somewhere in the middle of both.
The original story is set around the San Francisco Giants, but the report says the screenplay will transplant the action to the New York Mets. Make of that what you will, Mets fans.
Bad Bunny and Oscar nominee Colman Domingo are also both eyeing roles in the project. Specific character details haven't been confirmed for either. Bad Bunny, born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, is currently locked into a world tour running through the end of July, so the production timeline is still very much up in the air.
Domingo's involvement is described as similarly early-stage, but his trajectory since Rustin and Sing Sing makes him one of the more compelling actors that could be attached to anything right now.
No release date has been announced, but between Heller's eye for strong storytelling, Eggers' source material, and a great leading man, The Comebacker is sure to be a film worth checking out.