Universal Pictures has attached Glen Powell to star as Lou Gehrig, the New York Yankees first baseman whose death from ALS at 37 remains one of the most emotionally charged stories in American sports, in a biopic that reunites the actor with director Richard Linklater. Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels will produce, according to Hollywood Reporter.
Simon Rich, a writer for Saturday Night Live who is also attached to the Sam Altman comedy Artificial, is writing the screenplay. Michaels and Erin David produce through Broadway Video, which holds a first-look deal at Universal. Powell and partner Dan Cohen produce through Barnstorm, operating under a separate Universal first-look arrangement. Linklater is in talks to produce through his own Detour Filmproduction banner.
For Linklater and Powell, the Gehrig project marks their third collaboration. The two first worked together on Everybody Wants Some!!, Linklater’s 2016 collegiate comedy, and then on Hit Man, the 2023 crime film they co-wrote and which drew early critical attention at the Venice Film Festival before landing on Netflix. The sustained creative partnership is part of what persuaded Universal to commit to the project at this scale.
Gehrig spent his entire major-league career with the Yankees, batting .340 lifetime and hitting 493 home runs across 17 seasons. He was the cleanup hitter for the 1927 “Murderers’ Row” lineup, widely considered the most offensively dominant team in baseball history, playing alongside Babe Ruth in a partnership that defined the late-1920s Yankees dynasty. His record of 2,130 consecutive games played stood unbroken for 56 years until Cal Ripken Jr. surpassed it in 1995.
In June 1939, at age 35, Gehrig received a diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a progressive motor neuron disease for which there remains no cure. He retired immediately and delivered what became his most famous moment at Yankee Stadium: a speech in which he called himself “the luckiest man on the face of the earth” despite knowing he was dying. He died two years later, at 37. The disease carries his name in casual American usage and remains synonymous with him across generations that never saw him play.
The previous major screen treatment of Gehrig’s life, The Pride of the Yankees, arrived in 1942 with Gary Cooper in the title role and Teresa Wright as Eleanor Gehrig. Cooper received an Academy Award nomination for the performance, and the film has remained the default cinematic reference point for Gehrig for more than 80 years. Any new version will be measured against it from the moment casting is announced.
Michaels, best known as Saturday Night Live’s creator and executive producer, has been expanding his film slate under Broadway Video through the Universal first-look arrangement. Pairing with Powell, who became one of the more bankable names in Hollywood following Top Gun: Maverick, signals that the studio views the Gehrig biopic as having both awards and commercial potential rather than being one or the other.
What period of Gehrig’s life Linklater and Rich will prioritize is not yet known. Linklater’s body of work, from the Before trilogy to Boyhood, suggests a directorial preference for how time quietly reshapes a person’s sense of their own life. That sensibility could serve a story about a man who spent his prime years establishing a record for physical endurance while a disease was beginning to take it away from him. It could also produce something quite different if Rich’s comedic instincts pull the script toward the early Yankees years and Gehrig’s complicated dynamic with Ruth.
Powell, 35, built his commercial profile through ensemble roles before Top Gun: Maverick made him a recognized lead. His work with Linklater on Hit Man demonstrated range in character-driven material that carries intellectual texture alongside entertainment. Taking on Gehrig means inhabiting a role previously defined by Gary Cooper at the height of his stardom, which adds a dimension of artistic risk to a project that already has considerable industry momentum behind it.
The Gehrig story carries weight well outside baseball. ALS awareness has built substantially on his name, and the disease continues to generate research funding and public attention. A high-profile studio biopic would arrive into a cultural conversation where Gehrig is already present, though largely as a shorthand for courage in illness rather than as a fully examined human life.
No production start date, co-stars, or release window has been announced. The screenplay remains in development with Rich. Whether the finished film can locate something in Gehrig’s story that The Pride of the Yankees did not, and whether Powell can find a performance that stands apart from Cooper’s, are the two questions the project has yet to answer.
