A new take on The Bad News Bears is in development. Deadline reports that the franchise will get rebooted in the form of a single-camera comedy series at CBS. This new version will be written by Corey Nickerson (Black-ish) and is a collaboration between Aaron Kaplan's Kapital Entertainment and Wendi Trilling's TrillTV. Nickerson is also executive producing with Kaplan, Trilling, and Melanie Frankel.
Nickerson, who has experience coaching her son's youth baseball team, will take what she's learned for inspiration for the TV show. The new Bad News Bears will offer something different by having a woman coaching the team. Per the report, the reboot series follows a "down-on-her-luck divorced mom coaching a team of misfits in a cutthroat Little League."
Of course, we can presume that the series will also take inspiration from the previous installments of the franchise. The original film, released in 1976, was written by Bill Lancaster and directed by Michael Ritchie. Walter Matthau starred as a former baseball player and alcoholic who coaches a youth football team. While Matthau did not return, the movie was followed by two sequels: 1977's The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training and 1978's The Bad News Bears Go to Japan. In 2005, Billy Bob Thornton starred in a reboot in a role very similar to that of Matthau's in the first movie.
Bad News Bears Returns to the Small Screen
It might be mostly forgotten these days, but the franchise did have a previous television series based on The Bad News Bears. The show aired for two seasons on CBS in 1979 and 1980. In this version, Jack Warden played Morris Buttermaker, the character previously portrayed by Walter Matthau and Billy Bob Thornton. Former child star Corey Feldman was also featured in one of his earliest roles.
Meanwhile, there are others reaching into their own IP wells to revive hits from the past with new TV shows. Just recently, Prime Video presented a series based on A League of Their Own, which was previously a feature film released to great success in 1992. There had also been efforts at Peacock to launch a new series inspired by Field of Dreams, another famous baseball movie, though the streamer ultimately passed on the title. As of this past summer, it was still getting shopped around to new potential homes, but it doesn't seem any other streaming service or network bit on that one.
It's not yet clear when the new Bad News Bears TV show will arrive on CBS. We will have to stay tuned for more updates.