Bad News Bears on Paramount+: Billy Bob Thornton's 2005 Remake

⚾ Now Streaming: Bad News Bears (2005), directed by Richard Linklater and starring Billy Bob Thornton, premiered on Paramount+ on February 1, 2026. The timing follows the record-breaking finale of Landman Season 2 on the same platform — where Thornton also stars. It was previously available on Prime Video and Hoopla.

📋 In This Article

Why This Film Is Back Now — The Landman Connection
Bad News Bears (2005): Director, Cast, Story, and Reception
Full Cast of the 2005 Film
Box Office, Critics, and Why It Flopped — Then Found an Audience
Roger Ebert’s Review and What the Critics Got Right
The 1976 Original: The Film That Made This Franchise
1976 vs. 2005: What Changed, What Stayed, and Which Is Better
The Full Bad News Bears Franchise — Sequels, TV Series, and More
Bill Lancaster: The Screenwriter Who Wrote From Personal Pain
In Memory of Sammi Kane Kraft (1991–2012)
FAQs

There are two kinds of sports movies. The first kind ends with the underdog team winning the championship, the coach redeemed, and the crowd on its feet. The second kind ends with the underdog team losing — and somehow that feels like the point. The Bad News Bears is the second kind, twice over. It invented a genre in 1976 and, in 2005, Richard Linklater put Billy Bob Thornton in the driver’s seat for a remake that was faithful enough to frustrate critics and charismatic enough to outlast its box-office failure.

On February 1, 2026, the 2005 version of Bad News Bears arrived on Paramount+ — the same platform where Thornton has just finished his record-breaking run in Landman Season 2. Paramount is banking on the connection: viewers who watched Thornton play oilfield fixer Tommy Norris for two seasons are now being offered his alcoholic, cigar-smoking, exterminator-cum-Little-League-coach as their next port of call. This is the complete guide to what they’ll find.

★ The Landman Connection — Why This Film Is on Paramount+ Right Now

Why Bad News Bears Is Trending on Paramount+ in January 2026

Landman Season 2, the Taylor Sheridan-created oil-industry drama, concluded its run on Paramount+ in January 2026. The season finale set a new record as the biggest original series finale in the platform’s history. The season’s conclusion left Paramount+ with a Billy Bob Thornton–shaped gap in its schedule — and the network filled it by bringing Bad News Bears, Thornton’s 2005 film for Richard Linklater, to the platform for the first time.

The connection between the two properties goes beyond their shared leading man. Tommy Norris in Landman and Morris Buttermaker in Bad News Bears are essentially the same archetype drawn from the same vein: washed-up men in industries that chew people up and spit them out, who drink too much, trust too little, and find themselves unexpectedly responsible for people they didn’t ask to care about. Thornton has been playing this character, in various registers, for thirty years. He is very good at it. The Paramount+ algorithm is not wrong about this pairing.

Beyond Bad News Bears, Paramount+ is also hosting Thornton’s Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (2016, written by the same screenplay duo — Glenn Ficarra and John Requa — who wrote the Bears remake) as part of the same catalogue push. Landman Season 3 has no confirmed production start date, so the network will be riding the Thornton wave for the foreseeable future.

★ The Film on Paramount+ — Everything About the 2005 Remake

Bad News Bears (2005): Richard Linklater, Billy Bob Thornton, and What the Film Is

Bad News Bears (2005)

Story: Morris Buttermaker (Billy Bob Thornton) is a washed-up former pitcher who spent two-thirds of an inning in the Seattle Mariners bullpen before getting himself thrown out of the game for attacking an umpire. He now works as an exterminator, smokes cigars, drinks heavily, and pursues women with little success. He is hired by Liz Whitewood (Marcia Gay Harden) to coach a children’s Little League team that has been formed as the result of a lawsuit — the Bears, an assemblage of the most spectacularly unqualified young baseball players in Southern California.

Buttermaker forfeits the first game before a single out is recorded. The entire team quits. He promises to be better. He eventually recruits two secret weapons: Amanda Whurlitzer (Sammi Kane Kraft), the twelve-year-old daughter of a woman he once dated, who can throw a knee-buckling curveball; and Kelly Leak (Jeffrey Davies), a trouble-making teenage biker who hits like a professional. The Bears become competitive. Then, as the season approaches its climax, the question becomes whether Buttermaker will repeat the same mistakes that ruined his own career — or learn something from children he never asked to mentor.

Director: Richard Linklater made his name with Dazed and Confused (1993), Before Sunrise (1995), and the trilogy that followed. He has a particular gift for naturalistic ensemble work — sprawling casts of characters who feel like they exist when the camera isn’t pointing at them. That instinct is what makes Bad News Bears work better than the critical consensus suggests, even if it never quite escapes the shadow of its source material.

★ Every Named Character — Complete and Verified

Full Cast of Bad News Bears (2005)

★ The Numbers — Why It Flopped and Why That’s Not the Whole Story

Box Office, Critical Reception, and the Cult Following That Followed

Bad News Bears opened on July 22, 2005 and debuted at number five at the North American box office, earning $11.4 million in its opening weekend. It never improved from that position. The film ultimately lost money — earning $34.25 million worldwide against a $35 million production budget — making it a modest box-office failure, not a catastrophic one, but a failure nonetheless.

The critical consensus on Rotten Tomatoes — “This too-faithful remake aims low for laughs, turning off the easily offendable; despite another lovably irascible contribution by Thornton, it lacks the ensemble strength and originality of the 1976 version” — captures both the problem and the praise precisely. The film was punished for being faithful. A remake that diverged radically from the original would have been accused of disrespecting it. A remake that followed it too closely was accused of having nothing new to say. Linklater found himself caught between two impossible positions.

In the years since, the film has built a genuine cult following through television syndication — echoing the franchise’s history, since it was syndication that kept the original 1976 film alive into the 1980s and 1990s and established it as the cultural touchstone it is today. Audiences who encounter Bad News Bears without the burden of comparison tend to respond to it more generously than the 2005 critics did.

★ Roger Ebert’s 2005 Review — The Most Generous Major Notice the Film Received

Roger Ebert’s Review: Three Stars Out of Four

Roger Ebert was the most enthusiastic major critic to review the 2005 film, giving it three stars out of four. His take on Thornton’s performance has become the definitive description of what the actor brings to the role.

Ebert’s larger argument — that Thornton’s performance elevates material that the screenplay doesn’t fully earn — is the most honest assessment of where the 2005 film succeeds and where it falls short. Linklater’s direction is confident and relaxed; the child actors are mostly fine; the structure is tight. What the film lacks, compared to the original, is a sense that anything is genuinely at stake. The 1976 Bears played their games in an era before organised youth sports became the enormous anxious machine it is today, and that backdrop gave the film a tension — between childhood freedom and adult ambition — that the 2005 version, set in a world that already knows all this, cannot quite recapture.

★ Where It All Began — The 1976 Film That Defined a Genre

The Bad News Bears (1976): The Original and Why It Still Holds Up

Cast: Walter Matthau (Buttermaker — pool cleaner, not exterminator), Tatum O’Neal (Amanda Whurlitzer — paid $350,000 plus a percentage of profits, later estimated at $1.9 million total), Vic Morrow (Roy Turner, the Yankees coach — the film’s most physically frightening villain), Joyce Van Patten (Cleveland, the league manager), Jackie Earle Haley (Kelly Leak — on a bicycle, not a motorbike), Alfred Lutter III (Ogilvie), Chris Barnes (Tanner Boyle).

Score: Composed by Jerry Fielding, the score is a masterpiece of incongruity — it adapts the principal themes of Bizet’s opera Carmen to a children’s baseball context, giving the film an absurdist grandeur that suits its comedy perfectly.

Rotten Tomatoes critics consensus: “The Bad News Bears is rude, profane, and cynical, but shot through with honest, unforced humor, and held together by a deft, understated performance from Walter Matthau.”

Roger Ebert reviewed the original in 1976, giving it three stars out of four and calling it “an unblinking, scathing look at competition in American society.” Variety called it “the funniest adult-child comedy film since Paper Moon.” Gene Siskel, characteristically harder to please, gave it two and a half stars but found Tatum O’Neal’s performance “genuinely affecting.” The New York Times’ Vincent Canby praised director Michael Ritchie’s handling as a “wise-cracking, occasionally funny” exploration of sandlot life.

The film grossed over $42 million domestically against a $9 million budget — a significant commercial success. Walter Matthau was paid $750,000 plus over 10 percent of theatrical rentals. Tatum O’Neal, then 11, was paid $350,000 — an extraordinary sum for a child actor — plus a percentage of profits that eventually brought her total to an estimated $1.9 million. O’Neal later described the film: “It’s so funny. It’s so sweet. It’s sweet and, yet, it’s completely wrong. It’s just so wrong on so many levels.” That double consciousness — knowing the film is wrong and loving it anyway — is exactly the effect it still has on audiences today.

★ 1976 vs. 2005 — The Honest Side-by-Side

1976 vs. 2005: What Changed, What Stayed, and Which Is Better

Category	The Bad News Bears (1976)	Bad News Bears (2005)
Director	Michael Ritchie	Richard Linklater
Buttermaker actor	Walter Matthau	Billy Bob Thornton
Amanda actor	Tatum O’Neal, 11 (paid $350K + $1.9M total)	Sammi Kane Kraft (died 2012, age 20)
Kelly Leak actor	Jackie Earle Haley (bicycle)	Jeffrey Davies (motorbike)
Buttermaker’s job	Pool cleaner	Exterminator
Villain coach	Vic Morrow as Roy Turner (menacing, violent)	Greg Kinnear as Roy Bullock (smug, competitive)
Score	Jerry Fielding adapting Bizet’s Carmen	Edward Shearmur (original score)
Rating	PG (drinking in dugout permitted)	PG-13 (MPAA barred on-screen beer in dugout — hard liquor allowed as substitute)
Budget / Gross	$9M budget / $42M+ domestic	$35M budget / $34.25M worldwide
Rotten Tomatoes	97%	48%
Notable additions in 2005	—	Kid in wheelchair, Hooters waitresses, skate-punk interlude, South Asian and Armenian characters
Key omission in 2005	—	The original’s urgency and ensemble rawness that made the kids feel real rather than scripted
Where they agree	Both end with the Bears losing the championship. Both end with Buttermaker refusing to accept a trophy that feels unearned. Both argue, quietly but clearly, that adult ambition is the enemy of childhood.

★ Beyond the Two Films — The Full Franchise

The Full Bad News Bears Franchise

★ The Screenwriter — The Personal Story Behind the Film

Bill Lancaster: The Screenplay Written from Personal Pain

Bill Lancaster — son of actor Burt Lancaster — wrote the original 1976 screenplay from his own experience. As a child, he had played Little League baseball in Southern California with legs damaged by polio. The experience of being a physically limited kid in an environment that rewarded physical ability, surrounded by parents who cared far too much about a children’s game, gave Lancaster the emotional core of a story that no amount of later adaptation or updating has ever quite replicated. He sold the screenplay to Paramount Pictures for $105,000.

Lancaster died in 1997, before the 2005 remake was made. In 2005, the field in West Los Angeles where he had played as a child was renamed “Bad News Bears Field” in his honour — a tribute that sparked a small public controversy about which location had a better claim to the name, and that somehow felt perfectly in keeping with a franchise about adults arguing over things that should belong to children.

FAQs: Bad News Bears

Which Bad News Bears is on Paramount+?

The 2005 remake, directed by Richard Linklater and starring Billy Bob Thornton, Greg Kinnear, and Marcia Gay Harden. It premiered on Paramount+ on February 1, 2026. The 1976 original is available elsewhere but is not currently on Paramount+.

Why is it on Paramount+ now?

Paramount+ is filling the programming gap left by the conclusion of Landman Season 2 — which also stars Billy Bob Thornton and set a record as the biggest original series finale in the platform’s history. The Bears arrival is a deliberate catalogue move to capitalise on Thornton’s profile while Landman Season 3 prepares for production.

Is the 2005 Bad News Bears good?

Mixed reviews: 48% on Rotten Tomatoes, 65 on Metacritic. Roger Ebert gave it three out of four stars and called Thornton’s performance outstanding. The film flopped theatrically but has since found an audience through syndication. It is considerably more entertaining than its RT score suggests, provided you haven’t seen the 1976 original immediately beforehand.

Who plays Buttermaker in each version?

Walter Matthau in the 1976 original (a pool cleaner). Billy Bob Thornton in the 2005 remake (an exterminator). Jack Warden in the 1979–1980 CBS TV series.

Who wrote the original Bad News Bears screenplay?

Bill Lancaster, son of actor Burt Lancaster, who drew on his own experience playing Little League with polio-damaged legs. He sold the screenplay for $105,000. He died in 1997. The 2005 remake was written by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, based on Lancaster’s original.

What happened to Sammi Kane Kraft?

Sammi Kane Kraft, who played Amanda Whurlitzer in the 2005 film, died in a car accident on October 8, 2012 at the age of 20. She had been studying at UC Berkeley. Her baseball ability in the film — including a curveball that impressed Dodgers scouts — was genuine, not performed.