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- Nicolas Cage stars as NFL icon John Madden opposite Christian Bale as longtime Raiders owner Al Davis in Prime Video’s MADDEN.
- The MADDEN movie trailer opens as a traditional football biopic before shifting to the creation of the Madden NFL video game, with John Mulaney playing EA founder Trip Hawkins.
- MADDEN streams globally on Prime Video from 18 November 2026, following a limited theatrical release from 11 November.
On the first down, yes, that is a 62-year-old Nicolas Cage wearing what we can only assume is several pounds of John Madden prosthetics in a dramatic transformation for Prime Video’s first trailer for the upcoming MADDEN movie. Starring alongside Christian Bale as Raiders owner Al Davis in the David O. Russell-directed biopic, Nicolas Cage leads the movie as the one and only John Madden.
Set for a worldwide release on Prime Video on 18 November, the sports biopic stars Kathryn Hahn as Madden’s wife, Virginia and Sienna Miller as Carol Davis. Shane Gillis is also here as an original character. And then there’s EA founder Trip Hawkins, played by John Mulaney.
If your thumbs twitched on the controller the same way mine did, you know exactly where this movie is headed. For the first minute of the trailer, MADDEN looks every bit like the sports biopic you’d expect it to be. He’s coaching the Raiders at the peak of his career, piling up wins, before health issues force him off the sideline and into the larger-than-life television career that followed. NFL fans already know that story intimately.
But at one point, somebody put a computer screen in front of his face, and the rest is now nearly four decades of Madden games.
Nicolas Cage Puts On John Madden
The trailer starts where it ought to, with Madden doing what he always did best: obsessing over football.
And because Cage is clearly putting 110 per cent into the performance, there’s plenty of shouting and waving to recreate Madden’s habit of turning American football into something anyone sitting on the couch could understand. We see Bale’s Al Davis loom over proceedings in the background, before Madden is eventually sidelined by a bleeding ulcer that forces him to change how he lives. But that’s not the end of his football career. We follow his retirement from coaching into the commentary booth as an NFL broadcaster, where the version most people remember of John Madden really starts to emerge.
Then we turn our attention to the supporting cast. Those familiar with the story will recognise the names. Each one connects a different part of Madden’s life, giving the trailer a few familiar football-biopic drills to run through. You’ll see Hahn’s Virginia Madden throughout Madden’s coaching years, and Bale as Davis remains tied to his Raiders story. When John Mulaney’s Trip Hawkins arrives with his computer, Madden and the audience face something completely different.
“This is it. This is the future. Madden football.”
And suddenly we’re watching a whole other kind of movie.
The ‘MADDEN’ Movie Is Also a Video-Game Origin Story
Hidden underneath the John Madden biopic is another one of those “how did this enormous thing actually get made?” movies we’ve seen with Tetris and BlackBerry. Two gargantuan names in their own right, and now one of the biggest sports-game franchises on the planet is getting the same treatment.
But to make the game work, Hawkins needs Madden’s name and football brain. When Hawkins unveils the first version of the video game, Madden’s response hides nothing: “You only have seven men on a team and I’m out.”
Madden wanted the video game to resemble American football, pushing for 11-on-11 football rather than a simplified version built around the hardware limitations of the time. As Mulaney’s Hawkins puts it in the trailer: “I can make what’s inside your football mind live forever.”
EA didn’t just pay one of the NFL’s biggest names to have his name on the box. Their goal was to figure out how to program Madden’s football knowledge and experience into the video game. Thankfully, he was all too happy to hand over his playbook and work with the developers.
John Madden Football eventually arrived in 1988, five years before EA launched FIFA International Soccer in 1993 and six years before NBA Live debuted in 1994. It wasn’t the first sports video game, but Madden became one of gaming‘s longest-running major sports franchises.
And because Madden would eventually become almost as famous for its soundtracks as its football, the trailer finds enough room to introduce Madden to N.W.A. before he’s sensibly told not to ask what the name means.
Now, the original game didn’t actually have a soundtrack. And while the trailer briefly jokes about whether Dr. Dre is an actual doctor, we wouldn’t hear music made specifically for a Madden game until Ludacris turned up for Madden NFL 2000. Then Madden NFL 2003 properly kicked off the series’ licensed-soundtrack era.
When Does ‘MADDEN’ Release?
MADDEN streams worldwide on Prime Video from 18 November 2026, with a limited theatrical release from 11 November, although we haven’t seen whether Australia is included. It’s not an especially long film either, running for 1 hour and 50 minutes. Judging by how much ground this trailer covers, from the Raiders to broadcasting to building the video game, I don’t think we’ll be sitting around in the locker room.
For a movie starring Nicolas Cage buried under John Madden prosthetics (honestly, they give me John Candy vibes) and Christian Bale as Al Davis, there’s already plenty going on before we even get to the video game. It’s also the second major prosthetic transformation we’ve seen from a Hollywood heavyweight lately, following Tom Cruise disappearing beneath the face of Digger Rockwell. Cage is still considerably easier to pick out underneath all that Madden.
It’s a movie that could have easily been a standard sports story about how Madden went from coaching football to broadcasting. Instead, the trailer reveals how he taught a computer to play football.
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