Paramount and Skydance have set David Corenswet’s Mr. Irrelevant for a Christmas Day wide release after test screenings at the top of the year delivered numbers that made the sports drama stand out. The film posted a 92 overall score, a 95 among men over 35 and a perfect 100 among women over 35, a rare showing for a mid-budget movie heading into a date usually reserved for bigger holiday plays.
The release gives the project a prime slot just as theaters have spent years with few sports dramas in the mix. That makes the move notable for a film based on John Tuggle, the final pick of the 1983 NFL draft, who played one season for the New York Giants and won the team’s Special Teams Player of the Year award.
Jonathan Levine is directing the film, with Corenswet playing Tuggle and Isabel May cast as his love interest. The package is built around a mid-$30 million budget and was shot in Australia to keep costs low, a sign the studios wanted a contained theatrical bet rather than a sprawling prestige play.
What makes the decision sharper is the contrast with the rest of the marketplace. Sports dramas have largely been absent from multiplexes for years, and mid-budget titles in the $20 million to $50 million range have often struggled to secure the kind of opening this one now has. Paramount and Skydance are putting it on a holiday track anyway, betting that the test-screening response was not a fluke.
The film is also the first theatrical feature project under the Skydance Sports and NFL partnership, first established in 2022, and the first Skydance-produced movie Paramount has released since that merger closed. That gives the Christmas Day launch more weight than a routine release-date swap; it is the clearest sign yet of how the partnership wants to use theatrical films, even as it has also produced documentaries about Jerry Jones and Jason Kelce and the Hallmark movie Holiday Touchdown: A Chiefs Love Story.
The real question now is whether that rare positioning can translate into a box-office run to match the studio confidence behind it. For a movie built around a little-known NFL story and a test audience that responded especially strongly with older women, Christmas Day will be the first public answer.
