The story of one of the greatest NFL teams in football history is taking to the field.
Sunset Lane Media, the banner run by executive-turned-producer David Beaubaire, has optioned Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football, Rich Cohen’s acclaimed account of one of the most famous teams in American sports, and has assembled an offensive lineup to adapt the story as an event limited series.
Daniel Kunka, who penned the Kevin Hart heist movie Lift and John Cena action movie 12 Rounds, will write the adaptation, with Steve Pink, best known as the helmer of comedies Hot Tub Time Machine and Accepted, attached to direct.
Cohen, Beaubaire, Kunka and Pink are all Windy City natives who experienced this exhilarating run firsthand. No network or streamer is attached at this stage.
“This is a love letter to Chicago and to a moment when a city that had waited so long to win finally had a team that seemed unstoppable,” said Beaubaire, who is one of the exec producers of Netflix’s hit series Night Agent. “And the story wasn’t just playing out on the field. It was in the locker room, the stands, the bars and the family rooms across the city. It was riveting, funny, emotional and completely chaotic. We want to recapture that time in all its glory and chaos, remind people why we love these teams and this game so much, and show why, as cities go, Chicago is second to none.”
The 1985 Chicago Bears dominated football and America’s national consciousness in a way few sports teams had before. They became a national phenomenon at a turning point in sports, when athletes were beginning to become something bigger than what they were on the field.
The team went 15-1 in the season, shut out both opponents on the road to the Super Bowl, and defeated the New England Patriots 46-10 in Super Bowl XX, which was watched live by more than 92 million people, then the largest television audience in American history.
But the championship is only part of the story.
The Bears landed on the covers of Sports Illustrated, Time and Rolling Stone. The team released a Grammy-nominated single — “Super Bowl Shuffle” — before they had even won the Super Bowl. The team’s coach, Mike Ditka, who died last week, was immortalized in a series of Saturday Night Live sketches.
Underneath the phenomenon was an even more remarkable story: a collection of radically different people, enormous personalities, competing egos and sometimes bitter rivalries who somehow became a team united around one goal. And with them were the citizens of a city that had waited decades for a championship and was about to experience something it had almost stopped believing was possible.
“What has always fascinated me is that the ’85 Bears have somehow become bigger with time,” stated Cohen, a best-selling author who also co-created the HBO series Vinyl with Martin Scorsese, Mick Jagger and Terence Winter. “The personalities were enormous, the relationships were complicated, and what was happening behind the scenes was often every bit as dramatic as what happened on Sunday. They were funny, angry, brilliant, difficult and completely unforgettable. That is why I wrote the book. The mythology is great. The people underneath it are even better.”
Off the field, Ditka and defensive coordinator Buddy Ryan battled for control. Running back Walter Payton felt beleaguered, having spent his career carrying a losing franchise. Quarterback Jim McMahon clashed with Ditka. Rookie William “The Refrigerator” Perry became an overnight national sensation. Owner Virginia Halas McCaskey was under intense scrutiny, having just inherited the franchise founded by her father, George “Papa Bear” Halas. All together, they became something none of them could have become alone, personifying the city in which they represented in more ways than one.
“The story of the ’85 Bears is one of athletic excellence but also about character,” stated Kunka. “These guys didn’t come from the same places; they didn’t see the world the same way. There were feuds, rivalries, egos and real tension. But somehow, they all came together around a single goal. You know how the season ends. What you don’t know is everything it took to get there.”
The series aims to move between the field, locker room, front office and fans in the city to tell the story of a team becoming a phenomenon and a town discovering something it could believe in together.
“I want people in Chicago to watch this and feel like they are back there, and I want everyone who wasn’t there to understand why the rest of us have never shut up about it,” said Pink. “It should be loud, funny, emotional and alive. These were huge characters playing a brutal game in a great American city, and somehow the whole thing became a love story between a team and its town. That’s what I want onscreen.”