10 Best Fictional Sports In Movies, Ranked

Summary Fictional sports in movies can enhance a story’s themes by fleshing out the world they take place in.
Some sports in films, like The Hunger Games and the Transcontinental Road Race, highlight a dystopian society.
Great fictional sports should serve the movie’s story, whether an adaptation of a real sport or something unique.
Sports movies are big business, but sometimes a movie concocts a sport that doesn’t even exist. Sci-fi and fantasy movies often create fictional sports to flesh out the worlds of their stories, but other genres also have games which don’t exist in real life. In some cases, a fictional sport can be so compelling that people try to figure out ways to carry it over into the real world. This is what has happened with quidditch from the Harry Potter series and baseketball from the movie of the same name.
Great fictional sports don’t necessarily have to be ones which people would want to see in real life. Sometimes, the opposite is true. A fictional sport should enhance the world and the themes of the story. This could call for overly violent sports to illustrate a dystopian society, such as The Hunger Games or the Transcontinental Road Race in Death Race 2000. Whether a fictional sport is an adaptation of a real-life sport or something more unusual altogether, it needs to serve the story of the movie.
Related 12 Awesome Sports Movies Not Based On A True Story While most sports movies are based on a real-life player, team, or event, these classic films feature completely original characters and stories.
10 Competitive Scaring
Monsters University (2013)
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Monsters University shows Mike and Sully in their college days. The prequel focuses on staples of the American college experience such as Greek life and sports, and they combine for one of the movie’s most climactic moments. The competitive scaring event is the culmination of the Scare Games, an intramural tournament to crown the university’s scariest monsters.
Each event of the Scare Games eliminates one team, and competitive scaring is the final. Mike and Sully’s Oozma Kappa fraternity are the underdogs against Roar Omega Roar. Competitors have to enter a mock bedroom and rack up the highest possible score on the scare simulator. They are given information sheets on the children they are supposed to scare, and the competition showcases the different tactics used by the movie’s fun variety of creative creature designs.
9 Whack-Bat
Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)
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Wes Anderson’s movies, whether they are live-action or animated, tend to focus on father-son relationships in some way. The Fantastic Mr. Fox is no exception, as Mr. Fox has to come to terms with the responsibilities of fatherhood rather than continuing to live out his immature fantasies of pulling chicken heists with his friends. When his nephew Kristofferson comes to stay, this heightens the tension between him and his son Ash.
The Whack-Bat scene shows that Kristofferson is naturally talented in every way that Ash can only dream of. The coach explains the ridiculously complex rules of the game, and Kristofferson knocks the flaming pinecone beyond the twig-runners at his first attempt. Whack-Bat looks like a woodland creature’s version of cricket or baseball, but with even more complicated rules and a bizare scoring system which divides everything by nine for some reason.
8 Skeet Surfing
Top Secret! (1984)
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The absurdly dangerous sport shows that, like some members of The Beach Boys, Nick Rivers also has no idea what surfing culture is really like.
Top Secret is a great parody of spy movies, but it’s also a hilarious send-up of Elvis Presley’s acting roles. Elvis was such a big name that he could sell movie tickets even if his movies were never as influential or popular as his music. Val Kilmer stars as Nick Rivers, an American rock and roll star who becomes the only man capable of stopping East Germany from carrying out a terrorist attack. It’s exactly the kind of cockamamie plot Elvis was drawn to.