This 62-Year-Old Western Was John Wayne & James Stewart's First & Best Movie Team-Up Summary Olympics movies celebrate both the real triumphs of athletes like Jesse Owens and the fictional absurdities of comedies like Blades of Glory. Dive into inspiring true stories like Race and Richard Jewell, or enjoy whimsical underdog tales like Eddie the Eagle and Cool Runnings. Films like Foxcatcher and I, Tonya delve into the darker sides of Olympic sports, while classics like Miracle and Chariots of Fire inspire with tales of victory.
Ahead of the 2024 Olympic Games, it's the perfect time to check out the best movies about the Olympics, from Cool Runnings to Chariots of Fire. The 2024 Summer Olympics, officially dubbed the Games of the XXXIII Olympiad, will take place in France, mostly in the host city of Paris. The opening ceremony will take place on July 26 and the games will last until August 11 (with some competitions beginning on July 24). As usual, the Olympics will determine the best athletes from around the world in a series of grueling challenges.
Since it's one of the biggest sporting events around the globe and it's only ever a couple of years away from becoming relevant again, the Olympics have always been used as fodder for movies. There have been some Olympics movies that adapted incredible true stories for the screen, like the tale of Jesse Owens' historic victory that showed up Hitler in the biopic Race. There have also been plenty of fictional stories about Olympic athletes, like the absurdist ice-skating satire of Blades of Glory. There's a wide range of Olympics movies out there.
10 Blades Of Glory
Based on a story by Busy Philipps, Will Speck and Josh Gordon's Blades of Glory takes an absurdist comedic approach to the unwavering commitment of Olympic-level athletes. The movie stars Will Ferrell as sex-addicted bad-boy figure skater Chazz Michael Michaels and Jon Heder as shy, softly spoken skater Jimmy MacElroy, who are banned from men's singles skating after their rivalry escalates into a fistfight on the ice. They reluctantly team up when they discover a loophole that would allow them to compete as a pair.
As with all the best Ferrell movies, Blades of Glory has a rapid-fire gag rate that keeps the laughs coming. Ferrell shares hilarious chemistry with Heder as a mismatched figure-skating duo, and they have strong support from comedic icons like Amy Poehler, Will Arnett, and Jenna Fischer. Blades of Glory is endearingly silly and surprisingly uplifting.
9 Race
One of the greatest stories in sports history is Jesse Owens' track-and-field victory at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. At a time when Adolf Hitler was spreading white supremacist propaganda, a Black athlete came to his country and beat out the world's best white athletes to win a record-breaking four gold medals. Stephen Hopkins turned this incredible story into a powerful biopic with 2016's Race. Stephan James gives a spectacular performance as Owens opposite Jason Sudeikis as the coach who believed in his potential, Larry Snyder.
Rather than jumping straight to Owens' greatest triumph, Race explores the difficult journey he took to get there. Owens faces discrimination from his fellow athletes and wrestles with the decision to go to the land of Nazi propaganda. Race is a character study as much as it's a sports drama.
8 Richard Jewell
Clint Eastwood's Richard Jewell tells the unbelievable true story of Richard "Radar" Jewell, a security guard who worked at Centennial Park during the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia. While doing his rounds, he discovered a bomb planted at the park and alerted authorities to evacuate everyone from the premises. This should've made Jewell a hero, but instead, it led to him being wrongly accused of planting the bomb himself.
Although the film was criticized for depicting journalist Kathy Scruggs as having traded sexual favors for information, Richard Jewell was generally met with praise. Critics lauded Paul Walter Hauser's star-making lead performance as Jewell, Kathy Bates' turn as his mother, Bobi, and Sam Rockwell's turn as his friend and lawyer, Watson Bryant. Richard Jewell is a must-see for fans of the Olympics and true-crime stories.
7 The Boys In The Boat
Adapted from the book of the same name by Daniel James Brown, The Boys in the Boat revolves around the University of Washington's rowing team, and chronicles their quest to compete in the 1936 Summer Olympics. Joel Edgerton stars as the team's coach, Al Ulbrickson, Sr., alongside Callum Turner as one of the rowers, Joe Rantz, who recounts the story as an elderly man looking back on his glory days.
The Boys in the Boat didn't receive universal acclaim from critics - with some finding its execution mechanical - but director George Clooney tells this story with plenty of heart. The movie has strong performances, solid filmmaking, and an earnest approach to the familiar underdog story. The true story of this rowing team defying the odds to compete at the Olympics is wonderfully inspirational, and the movie captures that.
6 Eddie The Eagle
Before directing Taron Egerton in a biopic of Elton John, Dexter Fletcher directed him in a biopic of British ski jumper Michael Edwards - better known by his nickname, which formed the basis for the film's title, Eddie the Eagle. In 1988, Edwards became the first competitor to represent Great Britain in Olympic ski jumping since 1928. The movie chronicles Edwards' journey from dreaming of Olympic glory to actually representing his country at the Olympics.
Egerton shares delightful on-screen chemistry with Hugh Jackman as Bronson Peary, the hard-drinking snow groomer who reluctantly trains Eddie in the art of ski jumping. Eddie the Eagle has its fair share of familiar sports movie clichés, but it's sweet and charming enough to make up for it. The movie is a masterpiece of schmaltz and sentimentality that'll warm even the iciest of hearts.
5 Foxcatcher
Shortly after leaving The Office, Steve Carell tried his hand at a darker dramatic role in Foxcatcher. Carell plays multimillionaire and wrestling fan John du Pont. In 1986, du Pont hired two 1984 U.S. Olympic gold medalist wrestlers - Mark Schultz, played by Channing Tatum, and his older brother David Schultz, played by Mark Ruffalo - to help train American wrestlers to participate in Olympic competitions. This true story takes a sinister turn when du Pont murders the older Schultz brother.
Foxcatcher is an intriguing blend of wrestling drama and crime thriller. In the hands of Moneyball director Bennett Miller, who earned an Oscar nod, Foxcatcher is a captivating true-crime gem. Miller manages the film's grim visual style and disturbing tone with razor-sharp precision, and Carell, Ruffalo, and Tatum all give terrific performances in this tense three-hander.
4 Cool Runnings
The debut of the Jamaican national bobsleigh team at the 1988 Winter Olympics presented director Jon Turteltaub with a perfect high-concept premise for a crowd-pleasing comedy. Cool Runnings stars John Candy as former Olympian Irv Blitzer, who's tasked with training the Bad News Bears of bobsledding. Jamaica barely ever sees a single snowflake - and the snow that does fall lands at the peak of the Blue Mountains - and Irv has to teach a team of Jamaican athletes how to bobsled at an Olympic level.
Cool Runnings is the ultimate sports underdog story. It's not about the steadfast determination to win; it's just about figuring out how to play the game well, and the power of teamwork. Cool Runnings is a delightfully wholesome movie, and one of the rare films that appeals to audiences of all ages.
3 I, Tonya
Tonya Harding's life is no ordinary sports story, so it's only right that Craig Gillespie's I, Tonya is no ordinary biopic. It chronicles Harding's entire life story, from her upbringing by an abusive mother to her career as a professional figure skater, but it focuses on her role in the 1994 assault on her closest rival, Nancy Kerrigan. One day after practicing on an ice-skating rink, Kerrigan was attacked by an assailant who'd been hired by Harding's ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly.
Gillespie tells this story with the pitch-black humor, sly self-awareness, and kinetic energy of Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas. I, Tonya is shot in a mockumentary style with darkly comic one-liners and fourth-wall-breaking talking-head interviews with the cast. Margot Robbie gives one of her greatest performances as Harding, nailing the film's dark humor but also digging into her troubled psyche.
2 Miracle
Gavin O'Connor's Miracle follows the U.S. men's ice hockey team, whose gold medal victory against the much more experienced Soviet team at the 1980 Winter Olympics was dubbed the "Miracle on Ice." Miracle is essentially a real-life version of Rocky IV; it's all about plucky American athletes defying the odds to defeat their Soviet rivals in a spirit-lifting microcosm of the then-ongoing Cold War. Kurt Russell gives a phenomenal lead performance as the head coach, Herb Brooks.
Despite being based on a larger-than-life true story, Miracle can't avoid the clichéd trappings of the sports movie genre. But it does effectively capture the triumph of the U.S. team's victory and the nostalgia for a time when America rallied behind their national team and cheered them on. Miracle is a classically made Hollywood movie with an inspiring story.
1 Chariots Of Fire
Best Picture-winning sports drama Chariots of Fire revolves around two British athletes competing in the 1924 Olympics. Rather than focusing on the running itself, Chariots of Fire focuses on why they run: Scottish Christian Eric Liddell runs so he can feel the glory of God, while English Harold Abrahams runs to overcome the prejudice he faces as a Jewish man. Although it follows two of the fastest people in the UK, Chariots of Fire is a slow, somber, patient movie that takes its time.
The slow-motion running scenes, set to Vangelis' electronic theme tune, have been parodied countless times since Chariots of Fire arrived in 1981. But all those parodies haven't taken away any of the film's emotional impact. This tale of athletic gumption is still just as inspiring today as it was four decades ago.
