Lace up your Nike’s (or any other brand of basketball sneaker) and practice your jump shot, because Space Jam, the 1996 Michael Jordan x Looney Tunes crossover, is about to make its way to Netflix. Space Jam was released at the height of Michael Jordan’s fame, during the Chicago Bulls’ famous six NBA Championship run from 1991 to 1998 (which was re-visited in the Netflix docuseries, The Last Dance). When he wasn’t earning another championship ring for the Bulls, Jordan was busy saving the Looney Tunes from intergalactic slavery, the only way you can in a campy ’90s movie… basketball.
Space Jam slam dunks onto Netflix on February 1. After retiring from basketball to pursue his baseball career, Michael Jordan (unsurprisingly, played by Michael Jordan) gets abducted by the Looney Tunes, who need his help after a group of aliens took over Tune Town, and want to enslave the beloved cartoon characters. Does Michael Jordan use his superior physicality to beat up the aliens? Hell no! He plays them in a game of basketball, with the Looney Tunes’ freedom at stake. The official synopsis reads:
“After Michael Jordan’s retirement, he is abducted by Bugs Bunny from the Looney Tunes group and is asked to play a match to defeat the Nerdlucks, a criminal alien group led by Swackhammer.”
Space Jam was directed by Joe Pytka (Let It Ride) and featured several other high profile NBA players, including Larry Bird and Charles Barkley. The movie also starred Bill Murray and Wayne Knight, with Danny DeVito voicing the evil Swackhammer. The film was a box office hit when it was released. Thanks to the combined PR strength of Michael Jordan’s name and the Looney Tunes IP, Space Jam grossed $250 million worldwide.
‘Space Jam’ Was Misunderstood By Critics
Critics weren’t kind to Space Jam when it was released in 1996. Many critics wrote the movie off as an unabashed sneaker commercial — which, in many ways, it was. Space Jam holds a divided critics’ score of 44% on Rotten Tomatoes. While the audience score is much higher, it’s still far from where it deserves to be, currently sitting at 63%. As the film was released decades before the advent of Rotten Tomatoes, many of the critics’ reviews come from 25th anniversary reassessments.
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But, if you decide to flick through the negative reviews, just keep one important thing in mind: they’re all wrong. Space Jam is a cinematic masterpiece that would make Orson Wells weep and Martin Scorsese shout “This is cinema!” as he jumps for joy. In his 1996 review, Roger Ebert proved why he was the GOAT, awarding the film 3.5/4 and describing it as “a happy marriage of good ideas.” His review continued:
“[It’s] three films for the price of one, giving us a comic treatment of the career adventures of Michael Jordan, crossed with a Looney Tunes cartoon and some showbiz warfare.”
Release Date
November 15, 1996
Runtime
88 Minutes
Stream
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