After the Kansas City Chiefs and Buffalo Bills got their turn in the Hallmark movie spotlight, the Chicago Bears will be hitting the big screen.
Or whatever size TV you have in your house, because it will be on cable.
The movie will be called “Holiday Touchdown: A Bears Love Story,” and production is set to begin this summer.
Now, whenever I hear about this, I always wonder, “What the hell could the plot be?”
Luckily, I minored in screenwriting in college, so I’ve put together a treatment of what I think would be a really kickass Bears Hallmark movie.
Sorry, I mean “kick-butt”… it’s Hallmark Channel.
…
The opening titles are shown over drone footage of Chicago with the song “25 or 6 to 4” by Chicago playing over it, for obvious reasons. If that’s too expensive, let’s just record it ourselves, make one of the notes a little sharp, and call it a day.
Chandra Ditka (no relation) is a high-powered ad executive who lives in Chicago. She finds football barbaric and has no time for it because she is so focused on work. Her dad, Richard “Dick” Ditka, always asks her to go to Bears games with him, but she’s so busy coming up with ad campaigns that she always turns him down.
One day, not long before Christmas, she’s waiting in line for an Italian beef sandwich — which she does every day — when she meets a very handsome fella by the name of Brad Bearman.
The two hit it off because they realized they like their Italian beefs the same way (dry with gravy on the side, sweet and hot peppers) and agreed to go out sometime.
On their first date, they go stare at that stupid bean statue for a couple of hours, until Brad says, “This sucks, we should go to the Bears game tomorrow. They play the Packers.”
Chandra likes Brad and doesn’t want to offend him by saying she’s not into football, so she reluctantly agrees.
The next day, before the game, she meets up with her quirky friend, Janice. They go to shops on Michigan Avenue, and we see a shopping montage where she tries on a bunch of jerseys and hat combinations, with Janice shaking her head “no” each time.
That night, Brad picks her up for the game, and Chandra walks out of her apartment wearing a DJ Moore jersey, which she says she just bought for the occasion. He realizes that this means she bought it on sale because he got traded and starts to suspect that she’s a poser.
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They take an Uber to the game, and the whole way there, Chandra is answering emails about her new ad campaign for a new kind of DUDE wipes called DUDE Wipes For Her (people love product placement, and the DUDE Wipe folks will be down for this), while Brad rants about how much he hates the Packers.
This is because they’re division rivals, but also because his parents were killed by a mugger in a Packers hat while leaving the opera when he was a kid (yes, like Batman; it’s a fun little easter egg).
They arrive at Soldier Field and get to their seats when Chandra realizes she’s sitting in the same row as her dad, who is there by himself.
She doesn’t want her dad to see that she finally decided to go to a game, but it wasn’t with him, so she has to put on wacky disguises every time he gets up to pee (which is a lot; he should probably go get that checked out). One time, she takes a guy dressed as Bill Swerski’s of “Bill Swerski’s Super Fans” fame’s mustache and wears it.
Despite the situation with her dad, Chandra and Brad are having a good time at the game and really hitting it off, even though at one point he got into a shouting match with a guy wearing a cheesehead, and she has to cool it so security doesn’t get called, and he should put his shirt back on.
They agree to see each other again, right as the Bears kick a go-ahead field goal with under a minute to play. Brad starts yelling at the cheesehead guy again.
Her dad, who missed the field goal because he was peeing, comes back to his seat and asks Brad and Chandra what happened, and realizes it’s his daughter.
She apologizes profusely for not going to the game with him and going with a date instead.
Her dad is fine with it and tells her that she’s in her early forties and “time ain’t slowin’ down,” so it makes more sense for her to go with some dude instead of him. He also said he likes going by himself because the extra seat means he can stretch out and doesn’t have someone yammering in his ear the whole time.
ZERO BS. JUST DAKICH. TAKE THE DON’T @ ME PODCAST ON THE ROAD. DOWNLOAD NOW!
Chandra says that maybe next home game she’ll put work aside and catch the game with her dad, but he says, “Did you hear what I just said. I like watching by myself.”
She admits that’s fair and just orders him some Bears junk off of Amazon for Christmas.
She and Brad decide to continue going to games together (until the Bears move to Indiana; they don’t want to drive that far), and their relationship begins to flourish as they leave the stadium for a late-night deep-dish pizza (even though Brad is a tavern-style guy; there has to be a give-and-take in this relationship).
The End (or it could say, “The End?” so that everyone watching is like, “Whoa, maybe there will be a sequel?!)
