Nike Headquarters Play Central Character In Affleck's ‘AIR’

BEAVERTON, Ore. (April 6, 2023) — Nike headquarters have a central role in the new film “AIR,” starring producer Matt Damon and director Ben Affleck as company CEO Phil Knight.

Damon plays Sonny Vaccaro, a basketball division executive who attempts to persuade rookie Michael Jordan into signing a sneaker deal with Nike in the early 1980s. The brand’s philosophy and its Beaverton roots are featured prominently in the new feature, which Amazon Studios released nationwide Wednesday under a new model Damon and Affleck hope can nudge the film industry back on to firmer ground. Their production company Artists Equity is designed to make the business more equitable for its creatives, including “cinematographers, editors, costume designers and other crucial artists who, in my view, are very underpaid,” Affleck told the New York Times last year.

Oregon-set “AIR” tells a surprisingly fast-paced and tightly-written story about the origins of the global sneaker phenomenon Air Jordans. It is a promising first release for Artists Equity, with a 95 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, $3.2 million in opening day box office returns and a stellar cast: Viola Davis and Julius Tennon co-star as Jordan’s parents, along with Chris Tucker, Marlon Wayons and Chris Messina in supporting roles.

Though the film was shot last year in Los Angeles, the story is set in several locations: Vaccaro is seen gambling in Las Vegas and he visits the Jordan family home in Wilmington, but its central backdrop is a corporate office building outside Portland. Jordan’s agent David Falk (Messina) even makes reference to the brand’s anomaly in not yet establishing an East Coast office, “like a normal company.”

The film is never suffocated by its almost-singular setting. Essential action unfolds inside its rooms, from Vaccaro’s early insight into Jordan’s potential, Peter Moore (Matthe Maher) designing a now-ubiquitous shoe around the athlete’s likeness and marketing pitches with executive Rob Strasser (Jason Bateman).

“AIR” does not get bogged down in Nike’s origin story, despite making subtle nods to its logo, slogan and rise to success. At times Vaccaro and Knight discuss “the old Nike days,” before it became a billion-dollar public corporation, when Knight was “selling sneakers out of the back of his car.” The viewer can’t help but draw comparisons to a time when Affleck and Damon first broke in as writers with their Academy Award-winning feature “Good Will Hunting” in 1994. Though of course the entertainment industry was plagued with problems back then, moviegoers were actually going to theaters to see new stories, long before streaming existed, when few motion pictures were based on existing IP or franchises.

The movie parallels Jordan’s rise as well as the filmmakers’, matching the stakes of a company embracing a do-or-die moment. The Knight character even discusses having to answer to the Nike board, leaders of a company banking on predictable outcomes. They’ll want a sure thing, and in 1984, Jordan had not yet played in the NBA. He was not a sure thing, and in an industry of stretched-thin superhero stories and video game offshoots, neither is “AIR.”

The parallels add a compelling layer to an already-interesting narrative, and screenwriter Alex Convery somehow carves a riveting movie out of a shoe’s inception. Though the real-life protagonists take a risk with Jordan, hoping it pays off, we all know how that ends. The push to get audiences back in theaters, and the role of “AIR” in making that happen, remains to be seen.