It’s been a long time coming, but we’ve finally got our big, goalkeeper-gloved hands on the first trailer for “Oscar losing” director Taika Waititi, Next Goal Wins.
Check out the trailer below.
On the face of things, Taika Waititi’s next cinematic outing after Thor: Love and Thunder looks to be riding on Ted Lasso's coat-tails. A high-flying Dutch-American soccer coach, fired from his position as head of the US U20s national team is sent to a remote island to help a team of well-meaning amateurs break into the big leagues.
It sounds, on the face of it, like a typically heartwarming sports comedy in the vein of The Mighty Ducks, Cool Runnings or, most pertinently, Ted Lasso in reverse. But Next Goal Wins, with a release crippled by a global pandemic and a series of delays, was actually filmed all the way back in November 2019, a good few months before Jason Sudekis’ footballing juggernaut dropped, and long before Waititi’s last venture into the MCU.
The trailer delivers much of what you’d expect from Waititi and the genre – a gaggle of loveable (if slightly useless) oddballs, Michael Fassbender as a furious fish out of water, Rhys Darby pointing at a PowerPoint…
Regardless, after a few years in Disney’s blockbuster realm with his MCU and Star Wars projects, Next Goal Wins looks like Waititi back on familiarly wholesome ground. Based on the 2014 documentary of the same name, the film follows the true life story of Thomas Rongen – who’s life sounds rather similar to what’s set up in the trailer.
The film is scheduled for release in cinemas on 17 November 2023.
