‘Mr. Irrelevant’ Trailer: Corenswet Plays NFL’s John Tuggle

Two seconds into the first Mr. Irrelevant trailer, David Corenswet is wearing an orange jersey printed with a nickname that sounds like a punchline. It is not one. The Superman star plays John Tuggle, the last man selected in the 1983 NFL Draft, and the story Paramount and Skydance Sports are bringing to theaters this Christmas is one of the most quietly devastating underdog tales in American sports. After months of teases, the first full trailer finally dropped on Sunday, September 13, and it does exactly what a great sports biopic trailer should: it makes you want to hug a stranger.

The last pick who refused to be irrelevant

Every year the NFL gives its final draft selection the playful title of “Mr. Irrelevant.” The pick is supposed to be a footnote, a photo op, a trivia answer. John Tuggle refused the assignment. A running back out of the University of California, Tuggle was chosen with the 335th overall pick in the 12th round of the 1983 draft, landing with a New York Giants team that had just hired a first-year head coach named Bill Parcells. The conventional wisdom said he would be training camp filler. Tuggle instead made the roster, played all 16 games as a rookie, and was voted the Giants’ Special Teams Player of the Year by his own teammates. He even started at fullback late in the season when injuries hit the backfield.

His stat line reads like the modest box score of a role player: 17 carries for 49 yards, a touchdown, three catches, and 156 return yards. But the numbers miss the point entirely. The point is that a man drafted last, with everything stacked against him, earned the respect of a locker room full of professionals in a single season. In the weight room, teammates later recalled, he was otherworldly. The New York Times noted he regularly bench-pressed 435 pounds at Cal, outlifting teammates who outweighed him by 80 pounds. This was a man built to be overlooked and absolutely refusing to be.

What the trailer shows: camp, love, and the first sign of trouble

The trailer moves quickly through the beats you expect from an underdog story: the orange Mr. Irrelevant jersey at the draft, the grind of training camp, the cautious friendship forming between Tuggle and Parcells, and a budding romance with Katie, played by Isabel May. Then comes the turn. A shoulder injury suffered in a car accident leads to a doctor’s visit, and a shadow falls over the frame. Tuggle was diagnosed with angiosarcoma, a rare and aggressive cancer, in 1984. He kept training through chemotherapy anyway. “In the weight room, John Tuggle was not sick. John Tuggle was a standard,” Giants conditioning coach Johnny Parker said of that period.

The real story, chronicled in the ESPN 30 for 30 short “The Irrelevant Giant,” is as heartbreaking as it is inspiring. The Giants gently carried Tuggle on the roster so he could keep drawing his salary while he fought the disease, and the club kept paying his health insurance for the rest of his life. After he died on August 30, 1986, at just 25 years old, the Giants wore his No. 38 on their helmets throughout the 1986 season, all the way to the franchise’s first Super Bowl championship. His reported response to the diagnosis became the story’s rallying cry: “Am I gonna sit around and cry about this, or am I gonna take this as day one of beating it?”

Superman meets Zod: a cast made for the trailer

The casting is half the reason this trailer works so well. Corenswet arrives straight from playing the Man of Steel in James Gunn’s DC Universe, where he headlined Superman in 2025 and popped up in Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow this year, with a sequel, Man of Tomorrow, already on the way. Trading the cape for a Giants helmet is a sharp pivot, and the trailer sells it: this is a physical, grounded Corenswet, all sinew and stubbornness.

Then there is Michael Shannon as Bill Parcells. Shannon, who played General Zod opposite Henry Cavill in Man of Steel, now plays the coach who turned the last pick of the draft into a keeper. It is a reunion of sorts for two actors forever linked to Superman lore, and the dynamic between them looks like the film’s emotional engine. David Krumholtz, coming off a career run of scene-stealing roles, plays Giants scout Julius “Whitey” Horai, with Tuwaine Barrett, Thaddeus LaGrone, Alexander England, Spencer House, and Tandi Wright rounding out the cast.

Corenswet has clearly thought hard about the man he is playing. “What happens when a person who has defined himself by optimism and resilience is faced with a losing struggle? Can grace and dignity and humor and love transform failure into its own kind of success?” he told PEOPLE when the first look debuted in April. “These are the questions I thought were asked by John’s story.” Trailers rarely feel this considered, and that restraint is why the two-minute cut lands so hard.

Trusted hands behind the camera

The people steering this project know exactly what they are doing. Jonathan Levine, the director of Warm Bodies and the cancer dramedy 50/50, has spent his career making serious material feel human and funny, which is precisely the tone Tuggle’s story demands. Nick Santora, who created the hit series Reacher, wrote the screenplay, bringing the pulpy, practical toughness he is known for to a very different kind of fight. The production comes from Skydance Sports alongside Megamix and Blackjack Films, with the story first announced back in October 2023 and slowly, deliberately built since.

That pedigree matters because football biopics live or die on their casting of the relationship between player and coach. With Shannon’s rumbling authority and Corenswet’s quiet defiance, the trailer already suggests the on-field dynamic will carry the movie. Early test audiences, according to reports, have responded warmly, and the film is being positioned as Paramount’s emotional counterweight to the noise of the holiday season.

Why this story hits harder than the usual sports drama

Underdog movies are a genre with a well-worn formula: scrappy kid, doubting establishment, climactic victory. The Blind Side and a dozen others have made that template a box office staple. Tuggle’s story refuses the formula. He did win in the way that mattered, making the team and earning the respect of his locker room, but the movie’s second half is about something rarer: how a person faces an unwinnable fight with grace, humor, and absurd physical discipline. That is not a football movie. That is a movie about being alive.

It is also a reminder that “Mr. Irrelevant” was never really about one man. The final pick of every NFL draft carries the nickname forward now, but Tuggle is the one Giants fans still point to — the club itself has called him “The Irrelevant Giant” ever since. The film’s title does the same double work: it is both the cruel name he was given and the defiant way he wore it.

A Christmas release into a crowded corridor

Paramount is betting big on a December 25 opening, the single most crowded release date on the calendar. The studio has done this before with awards-season hopefuls, and the strategy is clear: open wide on the holiday, let word of mouth carry the film into January, and ride the emotional wave into awards chatter. For a story this sincere, the Christmas slot fits thematically — it is a movie about family, sacrifice, and showing up for the people who believe in you, even when the odds are hopeless.

The trailer closes on Tuggle in the darkness before a game, Parcells’s voice in the background, and the tagline “He will change the way you see the world.” That is a big promise for a football movie. But if the finished film delivers even half of what the trailer sells, Mr. Irrelevant is going to be the movie people drag their skeptical friends to on Christmas Day and walk out of quietly wrecked.