Peacock’s first teaser trailer for Shooting Stars features NBA superstar LeBron James looking back with fondness on his formative years in high school. Based on the book by James and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Buzz Bissinger (Friday Night Lights), the film explores LeBron’s friendship with four talented high school players and how they rose from obscurity to become national champs.
Marquis “Mookie” Cook stars as a young LeBron, Caleb McLaughlin is Lil Dru Joyce III, Avery S. Wills, Jr. is Willie McGee, and Khalil Everage plays Sian Cotton. Wood Harris plays Coach Dru Joyce II, Sterling “Scoot” Henderson is Romeo Travis, and Dermot Mulroney stars as Keith Dambrot.
Chris Robinson (ATL, Beats) directed and Frank E. Flowers (Metro Manila), Tony Rettenmaier (Space Jam: A New Legacy), and Juel Taylor (Creed II) adapted James and Bissinger’s book. LeBron James, Maverick Carter, Rachel Winter, Spencer Beighley, Jamal Henderson, and Terence Winter served as producers, with Gretel Twombly executive producing.
Shooting Stars will premiere on Peacock on June 2, 2023.
Shooting Stars Plot, Courtesy of Peacock:
It’s not how you start the game. It’s how you finish.
Shooting Stars is the inspiring origin story of a basketball superhero, revealing how LeBron James and his childhood friends become the #1 high school team in the country, launching James’s breathtaking career as a four-time NBA Champion, two-time Olympic Gold Medalist, and the NBA’s all-time leading scorer.
In the 1990s, a young LeBron James and his three best friends — Lil Dru, Willie McGee, and Sian Cotton — called themselves the “Fab Four,” after the famed Michigan Wolverines’ “Fab Five” of that era. From the moment we meet them, we realize this group of friends, under the guidance of coach Dru Joyce, is connected by more than basketball.
So, when the coach at the top basketball school in their district threatens to separate them by putting Lil Dru on junior varsity, the Fab Four decide to switch schools to be able to play varsity together, joining the team at a predominantly white Catholic school instead. The community takes this as an insult, but the boys’ dedication to each other is more important than anything else.
With their new coach, a disgraced former college coach seeking redemption of his own, the boys, along with former rival and new teammate Romeo Travis, will face battles not only on the court but in real life, in their quest to become national champs, and will rediscover that what matters most about the game is the people playing beside you.
