Amazon to develop a TV series on Tom Hanks starrer A League of Their Own

A League of Their Own fictionalised the real-life women's baseball team of the 1940s and early 1950s called All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. It received positive critical and commercial reception and inspired a CBS TV series.

The original A League of Their Own film was directed by Penny Marshall.

Looking at a few recent decisions by Amazon, it seems like the retail giant has decided to take on Netflix in earnest with its Prime Video service. Last year, Amazon bought the TV rights to JRR Tolkien’s timeless fantasy epic The Lord of the Rings, and it will develop at least one web series based on it. And now Amazon is ordering a Sony Pictures produced series with Sony based on A League of Their Own, a 1992 sports drama starring Tom Hanks, Geena Davis, and Madonna.

A League of Their Own fictionalised the real-life women’s baseball team of the 1940s and early 1950s called All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. It was directed by Penny Marshall and its background music was composed by Hans Zimmer, now regarded as one of the top composers in Hollywood. The film received positive critical and commercial reception and inspired a short-lived CBS TV series.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the series will be co-written and produced by Mozart in the Jungle writer Will Graham and Broad City writer Abbi Jacobson. It would reportedly be a modern look at the story instead of a traditional reboot, the publication reports.

The official synopsis goes like this: “A League of Their Own is a half-hour comedy infusing the warmth, humour and DNA of the classic film, while taking a contemporary spin on the stories of the women surrounding the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. The show will begin with the formation of the league in 1943 and will follow the Rockford Peaches season to season as they struggle to keep the team alive through close games, injuries, late night bar crawls, sexual awakenings, and road trips across a rapidly changing United States. The series dives deeper into the issues facing the country while following a ragtag team of women figuring themselves out while fighting to realize their dreams of playing professional baseball.”

Naysayers like Steven Spielberg and Christopher Nolan notwithstanding, streaming services are the future. But it is worrying to see so many reboots and remakes. It is easy to cash on the nostalgia of classic entertainment, but one would rather more original scripts were written. It is not as though the industry lacks talent.

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