“Undrafted” Eyes July Release Date

Baseball fans, rejoice, because we have a tentative release date for Undrafted, and it’s earlier than I thought!

Vertical Entertainment, which acquired the rights for Joe Mazzello’s semi-biographical directorial debut back in February, had announced via Facebook that they were aiming for a summer release date a couple of months ago. “We have ourselves a baseball comedy!” they said. Many apologies from me for not having discovered this information before now, because you’d better believe I would have passed that along.

The news that they were hoping to bring the film to theaters in July was brought to my attention thanks to Tumblr. On the original announcement post, with several people asking for updates, in a comment dated about two weeks ago, Vertical Entertainment informed everyone that Undrafted would hit screens sometime this summer, “most likely July”.

This is excellent news for fans of baseball or fans of the film’s athletic, attractive, and talented cast. Considering this film was first announced in 2013, and some of us had been aware of it (and anxiously awaiting updates) for just about that long, knowing that we may only have to wait a few short months to see it on the big screen is fantastic news. I had hoped, when news broke that Undrafted had finally received a distributor, that we would be getting it in theaters sometime this year, but I had no idea (and am very pleasantly surprised) to know that it may happen so soon.

I love baseball, I love baseball movies, and I will gladly take any chance to see a baseball movie in theaters.

Written and directed by Mazzello and loosely based on the experiences of his brother, Undrafted stars Aaron Tveit as John; the film centers around an intramural baseball game made up of misfits as John struggles to deal with being passed over for the draft, thus destroying his dreams of playing baseball professionally. Deadline describes the film as a drama, but Vertical Entertainment refers to it as a comedy, so it will be interesting to see what the balance of humor and angst is. It would seem, given the subject matter, that it will probably be a dramatic movie with moments of levity rather than the reverse, but there really is no way to know until we get a trailer.

The film also stars Mazzello, Chace Crawford (who is also credited as one of the executive producers), Tyler Hoechlin (who is currently getting rave reviews in Richard Linklater’s college baseball homage Everybody Wants Some!!), and Jim Belushi.

Author: Jamie Sugah

Jamie has a BA in English with a focus in creative writing from The Ohio State University. She self-published her first novel, The Perils of Long Hair on a Windy Day, which is available through Amazon. She is currently an archivist and lives in New York City with her demon ninja vampire cat. She covers television, books, movies, anime, and conventions in the NYC area.

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