About that ‘Kobe Bryant biopic'

The proposed movie about the 1996 NBA Draft is the kind of thing I would probably love, but I’m just not sure about most other people.

I hope this Havana street vendor, photographed the day after Kobe died in 2020, somehow gets to see the new movie.

In the more than five years since Kobe Bryant died in a helicopter crash in January of 2020, there has not been a full-on biopic made about his life or career. There’s likely a very good reason for that, but more on that below.

There have been multiple documentaries, both entirely or partially about Bryant, including a CNN multi-part take that I wrote about back in January, and one called “Eight on Eight,” in which eight people shared what Kobe meant to them. Kobe has also come up in docs about the “Redeem Team” and the history of the Lakers; there were plenty of Kobe docs, like Spike Lee’s Kobe Doin’ Work, that came out when he was still alive. And Bryant won an Oscar for his animated short Dear Basketball.

But now comes word of a Kobe feature film in the works at Warner Bros. Per the Hollywood Reporter, it’s not a full-on biopic, but rather about something very specific:

It’s called With the 8th Pick, and it focuses entirely on the process by which Bryant was drafted in 1996, when he was a 17-year-old high school student.

The basketball fans among you are likely thinking: Wasn’t Kobe drafted with the 13th pick, not the 8th? Yes. The Reporter:

With the 8th Pick is said to focus on the New Jersey Nets and then-general manager John Nash, who held the eighth pick in the draft and considered taking Bryant out of high school. The future Hall of Famer ended up being taken by the Charlotte Hornets with the 13th pick before he was traded to the Lakers, where he would win five NBA championships and become an icon of the city.

The Nets indeed picked 8th, with Bryant still on the board, but instead opted to draft Kerry Kittles, another shooting guard who ended up having a much less distinguished NBA career.

The obvious template would appear to be Air, the movie a couple of years ago about the signing of Michael Jordan’s first shoe contract with Nike. It was actually a fairly decent film, although it was notable for not including Michael Jordan as a character with a speaking part at all. An actor was cast as Jordan, and there were a couple of scenes of him in meetings where you can see the back or side of his head, but it wasn’t really his story.

The script’s big dramatic moment is a speech directed at Michael Jordan, while Jordan highlights play, but MJ himself does not react or speak: