This week Fathom Events is bringing another sports documentary to movie theaters — Pay Dirt: The Story of Supercross — in a relatively limited engagement spanning a couple of days at select theaters across the country. Rookie Season: 18 have marked as having watched it on Letterboxd. Niche enough to where it’s mostly just motorsports […]
This week Fathom Events is bringing another sports documentary to movie theaters — Pay Dirt: The Story of Supercross — in a relatively limited engagement spanning a couple of days at select theaters across the country.
Rookie Season: 18 have marked as having watched it on Letterboxd. Niche enough to where it’s mostly just motorsports people.
I noticed that a nearby showing on Tuesday (March 28) had a whopping 30-some seats on the floor, not in the risers, filled. Did those people ever show up? No idea. I’m picturing a solitary clown car rolling up and 30+ people piling out of it wearing Red Bull KTM, Monster Energy Kawasaki and Husqvarna gear and all that.
Adam Cheek joined Frontstretch as a contributing writer in January 2019. A 2020 graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University, he covered sports there and later spent a year and a half as a sports host on 910 the Fan in Richmond, VA. He’s freelanced for Richmond Magazine and the Richmond Times-Dispatch and also hosts the Adam Cheek’s Sports Week podcast. Adam has followed racing since the age of three, inheriting the passion from his grandfather, who raced in amateur events up and down the East Coast in the 1950s.
But it made me think about how, despite the lack of actual racing movies being made, some of these documentaries do get a theatrical release at times. Plus, the benefits and detriments to that — mostly benefits, as the detriments primarily stem from how limited said engagements are.
Blink of an Eye: nearly 300 people have Letterboxd it. In terms of niche sports documentaries, that’s a pretty damn huge amount of people — plus in relation to the Letterboxd crowd. I will say, though, that the Letterboxd user demographic has definitely shifted toward more of the everyman in recent years. When I joined it back at the start of 2019, I guarantee I was one of the only people to have some of these racing movies in my library.
Blink of an Eye came out in 2019, and I bailed slightly early on one of my classes the first semester of my senior year of college to see it. I hadn’t seen a NASCAR movie in a theater in 15 years since the release of the IMAX film. I was in class for a bit, I promise, and I swear I didn’t miss anything important.
His departure from the Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota, and M&M’s leaving the sport as a whole, marked the end of an era for me when it came to NASCAR. I remembered Ken Schrader running those schemes when I first started paying attention, then Elliott Sadler for much of my early childhood and then Busch from 2008-onward.
All that is to say that I think the theatrical windows, however limited they may have been, were good for these movies.
And, a few months later, Rowdy dropped into theaters, which our own Michael Massie and I saw on a big screen. I had talked with producer Chance Wright before its release and caught a screener of the doc beforehand, and it was neat to see the finished product in what ended up being Kyle Busch‘s final season in the No. 18.
Theatrical windows are super, super important for these movies, though. You’ll get random people to wander in, even if they habitually watch everything that comes out — they can see Captain America 4 or Novocaine or whatever any day of the week. One or two nights being the only way to see your movie is a pretty solid method of getting butts in seats.
The film is coincidentally directed by Paul Taublieb, who also helmed Blink of an Eye.
Three years later, 2022 had two of them.
Rowdy: It’s kind of neat to see reviews from people who had zero idea who Busch was. Admittedly, most of the reviews are from people who love the guy, but it has nearly 200 users marked as having watched it. Not a bad tally.
That’s been how I’ve seen at least three — four, after Pay Dirt — motorsports films in theaters that wouldn’t have otherwise made it onto the big screen.
I also sorted by “when added” for Blink of an Eye and I was the fifth person of the 293 people to mark the movie as watched. Ground floor, baby.
Rookie Season focused on IMSA and endurance racing, and was one I stumbled across on Fandango’s app while seeing what was playing nearby. Not the most memorable movie, but a neat little underdog story and with some fantastic sound design to it. Those cars can whine hella loud.
