From the football field to the Pacific.
Netflix has released the first teaser for The Mosquito Bowl, Peter Berg’s new World War II drama based on the extraordinary true story of college football stars who left promising careers behind to join the U.S. Marines.
Nicholas Galitzine stars as John McLaughry, with Bill Skarsgård as Bob Baumann, Ray Nicholson as Tony Butkovich and Tom Francis as Dave Schreiner.
Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the four young athletes enlist and are quickly pulled from the relative innocence of college football into the brutal reality of the Pacific War.
But football never completely disappears from their story.
While stationed on Guadalcanal and preparing for the invasion of Okinawa, Marines from the 4th and 29th Regiments organised a football game on Christmas Eve 1944. Many of the men taking part had previously been among the best college players in America.
The game became known as the Mosquito Bowl.
It ended 0–0.
For several of the men who played that day, it would also be the final football game of their lives before they were sent into the Battle of Okinawa.
Director Peter Berg adapted the film from Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Buzz Bissinger’s nonfiction book The Mosquito Bowl: A Game of Life and Death in World War II, with Berg and Mark L. Smith writing the screenplay.
And judging by the first teaser, Berg isn’t softening the contrast between the two worlds.
The footage jumps between football, friendship and increasingly violent combat, with explosions, fire and battlefield sequences filmed with an emphasis on physical action rather than keeping the actors safely removed from it.
Galitzine has revealed that the cast performed much of the action themselves, with limited stunt-double work and practical explosions happening only feet away during filming.
For Berg, though, the spectacle is only part of the story.
At its centre are four young men whose friendship and identities were forged on football fields before war forced them into circumstances none of them could possibly have been prepared for.
The Mosquito Bowl opens in select theaters on October 30 before arriving on Netflix on November 25, 2026.
