Ben Stiller's New Pickleball Comedy Movie, "The Dink", Is Coming To Every Device Near You After Getting Bought By Apple
Every great sport has a great movie to go along with it. Football has Remember The Titans, and Friday Night Lights. Baseball has Field of Dreams, and Major League. Hockey has Slapshot. Basketball has Hoosiers. Golf has Caddyshack, Boxing has Rocky, horse racing has Seabiscuit. The list goes on and on and on.
Once a sport gets big enough, it becomes a part of pop culture. And now Pickleball has reached that status with Ben Stiller producing "The Dink", which will essentially be the pickleball version of Dodgeball. If you're an avid Jordie fan, you'll know that I wrote about it last September.
We haven't heard much about the movie since then, but now we finally learned that Apple has purchased the movie.
Thank god.
Listen. I'm not going to use this time to completely rail against Happy Gilmore 2. There were a couple parts in that movie that were fun, and I know the whole purpose of the movie was to be over-the-top silly. But if that's what Netflix did for Happy Gilmore 2, I can only imagine what atrocity they would turn a pickleball movie into. It would take any sort of headway that pickleball has ever made into being accepted by the general public, and drop a steaming pile of shit directly on top of it. With Apple, at least it seems like there could be a chance this is something more than just a meme movie purely intended for clips. Maybe not as strong as Dodgeball, but at least something that doesn't make you think to yourself halfway through "why the hell am I watching this right now".
But here's the biggest issue with the movie going to Apple--most folks who play pickleball are never going to figure out how to watch it. People in their 60s are just starting to figure out how to work Netflix. Have you ever had to tell someone in their 60s/70s how to watch an MLB game that is an Apple broadcast only? It's like you just told them that the game is being played on the moon. They won't figure out how to watch The Dink until you actually sit them down and put it on for them.
But maybe that's a good thing. Maybe this movie is going to catch the 25-35 crowd. Pickleball is already getting younger and younger. Go to any pickleball club right now and you'll see it's not just a game for old people anymore. This could be the Caddyshack for pickleball. Or at the very least, a nice way to kill a couple hours on a Sunday morning whenever it's released.