'She Got Game' Is the Sequel That Needs to Happen...So We Made It with Women

It was an unforgettable scene: a born-and-bred New York film influencer and a future Seattle basketball legend chopping it up on the Coney Island courts. Raining threes, rolling cameras, spinning ferris wheel. 

Except this wasn’t 1998, and Spike Lee was busy finishing his new film. Ray Allen was nowhere to be found. Come to think of it, there was hardly a man in sight. 

Here we had music-video director Va$htie and Seattle Storm star Jewell Loyd powering Bleacher Report’s 2018 #BRMovies package with a 20th-anniversary transformation of He Got Game—one of our favorite sports movies of all time—into She Got Game.

Because right here, in this very moment, we can all agree that basketball, movies and women rule. And for all the fun B/R has with sports and culture every day, this time we decided to go all-in. You already know Jesus Shuttlesworth; now is the time for Faith Mothershed.

Of course, the short film above is really a reimagined trailer. But to make a three-minute movie preview (even a fake one) still takes an army—and in this case it was an army of 70-plus people...95 percent of whom were women. 

With locations ranging from the B/R NYC office to a reinvented Big State office to our reimagined Shuttlesworth family apartment complex, the #BRMovies team made She Got Game just for you.  

Asking an athlete to become a movie star overnight is no small feat. But Jewell worked with an acting coach and showed a range of on-screen emotion you’re more likely to see from Rosario Dawson than a former No. 1 overall WNBA pick. (Click here to read more from Jewell IRL and watch a behind-the-scenes video.)

Bringing everything into focus were B/R’s own writer/supervising producer Karin Hammerberg and producer Vanessa Casal-Onate, plus cinematographer Christine Ng, whose credits include shooting Lee’s own refreshed Netflix series She’s Gotta Have It and the Emmy-nominated HBO film Everything Is Copy. (Scroll down to meet the rest of our cast and crew.)

We wish all production crews—for three-minute videos, two-hour films and five-season Netflix shows—could be more representative of society. (And that change is underway.) We wish more sports fans—for one-minute highlights, two-hour games and the entire WNBA season ahead—would follow female athletes. (And we’re trying hard to make that happen, but we’ll try harder every day.)

Jesus Shuttlesworth himself once said you’ve got to try to shake things up: “Basketball is like poetry in motion. Cross the guy to the left, take him back to the right, he's fallin' back, then just J right in his face. Then you look at him and say, ‘What?’”

So we’ve got faith. Faith that She Got Game represents its own little part of ongoing movements, from filmmaking to sports culture and society—and the powerful places in between. We hope you’ll enjoy our new favorite would-be sequel (and spot every Easter egg), plus posters from more sports movie reboots you deserve, then share your favorites with the hashtag #BRMovies.

Thanks for watching,

Courtney Andrialis-Vincent
Senior Director, Premium Video
Bleacher Report