A 92 test screening score kept the Mr. Irrelevant movie on a Christmas release date — one week after Doomsday

Let's establish the battlefield first. On December 18, 2026, Avengers: Doomsday and Dune: Part Three open on the same day — an event horizon of IMAX bookings from which no mid-budget drama should escape alive.

And yet, one week later, on Christmas Day, here comes Mr. Irrelevant, in which David Corenswet — yes, Superman, that one — plays a man whose entire claim to fame started with being picked dead last.

That confidence isn't a vibe, it's arithmetic. The film's test screenings came back looking like this:

• a 92 overall, which for a grown-up sports drama is champagne-in-the-locker-room territory;
• a 95 with men over 35;
• a full, not-a-typo 100 with women over 35, a demographic that has never once been wrong about anything.

So who gets a perfect score from the toughest jury in America? John Tuggle: taken by the New York Giants with the very final pick of the 1983 draft — the slot the league lovingly calls "Mr. Irrelevant" — and the first man in that cursed position to actually make the roster of the team that drafted him. Then came a cancer diagnosis, and Tuggle was gone at 25. Bring tissues. Bring a second pack for the stranger next to you.

Jonathan Levine — the 50/50 guy, so he has done "funny and devastating at the same time" before — directs a Nick Santora script, with Isabel May as Tuggle's love interest, Michael Shannon as coach Bill Parcells (casting so correct it's almost rude) and David Krumholtz rounding things out. The whole production shot in Melbourne, because nothing says 1980s New Jersey like Australia.

"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?"

That's how Corenswet frames the movie, and if that logline doesn't work on you, the man's director has a simpler pitch. Levine has called his star "the beating heart and soul of this movie," adding he can't wait for audiences to see Corenswet "playing this real-life superhero" — a sentence doing gymnastics, given that Corenswet skipped this film's CinemaCon presentation because he was busy filming the actual-superhero sequel Man of Tomorrow.

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So that's Christmas: Earth's mightiest heroes, giant sandworms, a new Jumanji prowling the same week — and one very sincere underdog whose test audiences would apparently run through a wall for him. Tuggle would appreciate the matchup.

Previously we wrote: Survivor 6 cast: where are they now? Starting with the youngest woman ever to win