It has been over a year since we last heard an update about 48 Hours In Vegas – the upcoming based-on-a-true-story feature about controversial NBA star Dennis Rodman. The good news today is that that the info drought is now over, as it appears as though the project has found a talented rising star to play the lead role. Should negotiations go as planned, the developing movie will feature Loki‘s Jonathan Majors as the notorious Chicago Bulls player.
This update comes to us from Deadline, which says that a deal has not been officially signed but that the two parties are getting close in the talks. The movie is being produced by Phil Lord, Chris Miller and Aditya Sood (the talented filmmakers behind the animated Spider-Verse movies), and a script has been developed by Jordan VanDina (who wrote the 2020 comedy The Binge and for Hulu’s Animaniacs reboot).
48 Hours In Vegas won’t be a biopic that covers Dennis Rodman’s entire basketball career, as it instead will wholly focus on a two day period in 1998 when Rodman was playing in the 1998 NBA Finals and decided to go on an excursion to Las Vegas with the Chicago Bulls’ assistant general manager. The story gained recent notoriety thanks to the 2020 Michael Jordan-centric documentary series The Last Dance (which you can stream in its entirety with a Netflix subscription).
Jonathan Majors is unquestionably one of Hollywood’s most exciting stars at the moment, and not only because he is set up to be the next Thanos-level big bad in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The actor first started turning heads in 2019 with his supporting role in the A24 movie The Last Black Man In San Francisco, and he’s further established himself as a legitimate talent with the HBO series Lovecraft Country and the Netflix western The Harder They Fall.
Majors’ next film, the period war film Devotion, will be arriving in theaters this November, and he will be featured as the central antagonist in the upcoming marvel movie Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania, which hits the big screen in February 2023. Audiences will also soon see him opposite Michael B. Jordan in the upcoming Creed III, which is on track to come out on March 3, 2023.
Given Jonathan Majors’ gifts as a performer, it’s easy to imagine him doing amazing things playing Dennis Rodman in 48 Hours In Vegas, but one interesting challenge the production will have is properly depicting the proper height of the film’s subject. Majors isn’t short (he’s listed as being 6’0″ in his IMDb Pro bio), but Rodman is 6’7″. One would assume that the production will be employing some fun filmmaking tricks to create authenticity.
48 Hours In Vegas has a home at Lionsgate, with the studio purchasing the rights to the spec script when it hit the market, but a release date has not yet been announced. You can check out all of the films that do have set dates in the coming months via our 2022 Movie Release Calendar, and preview everything set to come out next year with our 2023 film schedule.