Netflix Drops the Full Trailer for 'The Mosquito Bowl' — Peter Berg's WWII Football Epic Is Almost Here

By The Entertainment Desk, Previously

October 13, 2026

Some trailers sell you a movie. This one sits you down and tells you a story you cannot believe you never knew. Netflix has released the full trailer for The Mosquito Bowl, Peter Berg's adaptation of Buzz Bissinger's nonfiction book about four of America's top college football players who set fame aside after Pearl Harbor, enlisted in the Marines, and — while training for the invasion of Okinawa — played one legendary football game on Guadalcanal on Christmas Eve 1944. It finished scoreless. Within a year, 15 of the 65 men who played in it were dead.

That arithmetic hangs over every frame of the trailer, and Berg clearly wants it to. Coverage of the film has repeatedly stressed his framing: this is a war film populated by football players, not a football film with war in it. The footage leans into the Pacific campaign's mud, heat and terror, with the game itself positioned as a last bright afternoon — young men who were recently being cheered in stadiums, playing once more before shipping out to one of the bloodiest battles of the war.

The Cast, and a Reunion Twenty Years in the Making

The four leads are Nicholas Galitzine as John McLaughry, Bill Skarsgård as Bob Baumann, Ray Nicholson as Tony Butkovich and Tom Francis as David Schreiner — a quartet that mixes rising-star heat with genuine acting pedigree. The supporting cast includes Brent Comer, Dominic Bogart, Ella Newton and, in a piece of casting that feels almost too perfect, former NFL punter and broadcaster Pat McAfee as a drill sergeant. If you are going to put a real football voice inside a Marine boot camp, that is the one.

Behind the camera, the film is a family reunion. Berg directs and co-wrote the screenplay with Mark L. Smith, whose credits include The Revenant. The source book is by Buzz Bissinger — Berg's cousin, and the author of Friday Night Lights, which Berg turned into his acclaimed 2004 film and the beloved television series that followed. The Mosquito Bowl reunites that partnership on the subject both men understand best: what sport means to young men, and what it costs them. Even the music carries the lineage — Explosions in the Sky, so central to the sound of Friday Night Lights, provides the score. Brian Grazer produces alongside Berg and Alex Gayner for Film 44 and Imagine Entertainment.

Made the Hard Way, on Purpose

The production was built for immersion rather than green-screen comfort. The film shot in Queensland and northern New South Wales in Australia, standing in for the Pacific theater, with practical pyrotechnics and the cast doing much of the physical work themselves with minimal stunt doubles. Galitzine has described explosives going off close enough to feel, and the philosophy behind it is visible in the trailer: when everything around the actors is real, they have to do less, because the war is happening to them rather than being added later. It is the same instinct that powered Berg's Lone Survivor — grit first, polish second.

The Book Beneath It

It is worth pausing on the source material, because this is not a screenwriter's invention polished up with a "based on a true story" card. Bissinger's book, published in 2022, grew out of a footnote in Marine Corps history: the 6th Marine Division was training on Guadalcanal for the Okinawa invasion when someone realized the 4th and 29th regiments could each field something close to an all-star college team. The game that followed drew Marine brass, hundreds of spectators and even bets and radio attention. Bissinger — a Pulitzer Prize winner long before Friday Night Lights — built the book around the lives of the men who played in it, following several of them in depth from campus fame through training and into the Pacific. The nearly three-month battle for Okinawa that awaited them became one of the bloodiest of the war. That is the weight the film carries into every screening: audiences will not just be watching a game, they will be watching men enjoy the last ordinary afternoon of their lives, and Berg knows better than to rush past that.

The Release Plan Says Awards Season

Netflix is not treating this as a quiet streaming drop, and the calendar proves it. The Mosquito Bowl has its world premiere as a gala presentation at AFI Fest at the TCL Chinese Theatre on October 22. It then opens in select AMC cinemas on October 30 — notably, the first Netflix-AMC partnership since KPop Demon Hunters — before arriving on Netflix on November 25, the day before Thanksgiving. That is a streamer behaving like a studio with a contender: festival launch, theatrical window for eligibility and word of mouth, then a holiday streaming debut when families are home and actually watching together. The film runs 127 minutes and is rated R.

Our honest reaction to the trailer: this is the most confident thing Berg has shown in years, precisely because it sits exactly where his two careers meet — the sports storyteller of Friday Night Lights and the combat filmmaker of Lone Survivor, finally making one movie instead of alternating between them. Whether it lands as an awards player will be decided at AFI Fest next week. But as a piece of history rescued from a footnote, it already feels essential. Sixty-five men played a football game in the mud on Christmas Eve, and fifteen never came home. Somebody needed to make this film. It might as well be the cousins who made us all care about a high school team in West Texas. More trailers and release dates live on the Previously movies desk and across today's newsroom.