Peter Berg may have found the most Peter Berg movie imaginable: college football, the U.S. Marines and a true story forged in the Pacific during World War II. Netflix has released the official teaser trailer for The Mosquito Bowl, starring Nicholas Galitzine, Bill Skarsgård, Ray Nicholson and Tom Francis as real-life football stars who put promising futures aside to enlist after Pearl Harbor. Watch the trailer above and get the details below.
Four Football Stars, One Very Different Fight
The Mosquito Bowl follows John McLaughry (Galitzine), Bob Baumann (Skarsgård), Tony Butkovich (Nicholson) and David Schreiner (Francis), four standout college players whose plans for the future are shattered by America’s entry into World War II.
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McLaughry was a Brown University quarterback coached by his own father. Baumann and Schreiner both played at the University of Wisconsin, while Butkovich was a record-setting Purdue standout.
Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the young men enlist in the Marines and eventually find themselves in the Pacific, preparing for the bloody invasion of Okinawa.
As the trailer makes clear, the shift won’t be romanticised. The cheers and mud of the football field give way to burning landscapes, gunfire and explosions as the young men are thrown into a world far removed from the one they left behind.
Berg’s résumé makes the assignment almost suspiciously well matched. He directed the acclaimed 2004 football drama Friday Night Lights and developed the television series that followed, while Lone Survivor and Patriots Day put him deep inside fact-based stories of men facing extreme circumstances.
Yes, the Mosquito Bowl Was a Real Game
The title comes from an extraordinary football game played on Guadalcanal on Christmas Eve 1944. Two Marine regiments from the 6th Marine Division faced off, with their teams packed with men who had played college football before entering military service.
The game was played while the Marines were preparing for what was coming next: the Battle of Okinawa. For many of those who took the field that day, it would be the final football game they ever played.
The film is based on Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Buzz Bissinger’s 2022 nonfiction book The Mosquito Bowl: A Game of Life and Death in World War II. It also reunites Bissinger and Berg decades after another football story brought them together: Bissinger wrote Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream, which Berg adapted for his 2004 film.
Berg had known about Bissinger’s book before committing to the movie. Recalling the moment the project suddenly clicked into place, he told Fast Company: “Then I was at dinner at a friend’s house, and his son looked at me and said, ‘You gotta do The Mosquito Bowl.’”
The story also has a personal connection for both Berg and Bissinger. Bissinger’s father served at Okinawa, while Berg’s father was a Marine during the Korean War.
Speaking with Esquire, Berg said: “That generation bottled up so many feelings and memories and just had no skill set to talk about them.”
Berg Put His Actors Right in the Middle of It
If the explosions in the trailer look close to the actors, that’s apparently because they were.
Galitzine told Netflix site Tudum: “We’ve done pretty much everything ourselves with limited use of stunt doubles — explosives going off a couple feet from our faces, trees on fire.”
Berg, however, isn’t interested in combat simply as spectacle. He told Tudum that he is drawn to finding love, compassion and human connection inside traumatic environments, where intensity and emotion collide.
The Actors Had Real Men to Live Up To
That also meant playing people whose families and histories exist beyond the screenplay. Nicholson said the reality of the men they were portraying affected how the cast approached the work, while Galitzine went beyond McLaughry’s football career when researching him.
Nicholson had already found a rather neat way of describing the project in an interview with Numéro Netherlands: “I said while I was young I’d like to do a sports movie and a war movie, and we did it in one.”
McLaughry was also an artist, and Galitzine studied his work while trying to understand who he had been away from the field. The actor has said that the beauty of McLaughry’s art helped reveal someone who was far more than simply a gifted football player.
The real Mosquito Bowl itself was also difficult for Galitzine to comprehend. These Marines were living through the horrors of war before briefly returning to a game that had once occupied such a huge part of their lives.
The four leads also spent months training and filming together. Skarsgård has said that, on a much smaller scale, the experience allowed the actors to form the kind of bond that sits at the heart of the story.
For Francis, the scale of the production came with an additional learning curve. The Tony-nominated Sunset Boulevard performer had never made a feature film before The Mosquito Bowl.
Australia Stands In for the Pacific
Production took place across Queensland and northern New South Wales, with the Australian landscape doubling for Marine training camps and locations throughout the Pacific theatre. Berg previously described Queensland as an ideal environment for bringing the scale of the story to the screen.
The film also marks Berg’s first feature as director since Netflix’s 2020 Mark Wahlberg action-comedy Spenser Confidential. He has remained busy with the streamer since then, directing episodes of opioid drama Painkiller and all six episodes of the brutal western American Primeval.
Berg co-wrote The Mosquito Bowl with Mark L. Smith, whose credits include The Revenant and Twisters. Brian Grazer and Alex Gayner produce alongside Berg, while Bissinger, Ezra Emanuel and Jeb Brody are among the executive producers.
And there’s one more Friday Night Lights connection: Explosions in the Sky, whose music became inseparable from Berg’s 2004 film, have reunited with the director to score The Mosquito Bowl.
Release Date
The Mosquito Bowl opens in select cinemas on October 30 before arriving on Netflix on November 25, 2026.
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