Inside Peter Berg’s The Mosquito Bowl: The Untold Battle That Will Redefine WWII Dramas Forever
Ever stopped to wonder what a football game played smack in the middle of a World War II battlefield might look like? Picture this: it’s Christmas Eve, 1944, on the grimy, mosquito-infested island of Guadalcanal—yeah, the kind of place where even the insects have a war footing. Amid the mud and chaos, two U.S. Marine regiments, packed with college football stars who traded their cleats for combat boots, set up a makeshift gridiron battle. This wasn’t your usual touchdown glory—it was a heart-pounding, poignant clash soaked in brotherhood, sacrifice, and the haunting shadow of the war raging around them.
Now, fast-forward to today, and filmmaker Peter Berg—the genius behind Friday Night Lights—breathes new life into this extraordinary “Mosquito Bowl” in his latest Netflix release. It’s more than just a film; it’s a moving tribute capturing not only the valor of these young men but the raw human spirit thrumming beneath the surface of history. So, what does it mean to hold joy, hope, and a football game in the midst of hell? That’s the story Berg wants us to remember.
10 min readEvery football fan knows how memorable a postseason college game can be. The Rose Bowl, the Sugar Bowl, the Orange Bowl. In every case, excitement, passions, and enthusiasm run high, but there’s another lesser-known bowl game that was played only once, nearly 82 years ago, but carries even more profound emotional and historical heft. A new Netflix movie called The Mosquito Bowl, from Friday Night Lights filmmaker Peter Berg, aims to bring it to the attention of a new generation.
The true-life Mosquito Bowl took place in December 1944, and a devastating number of its key players died shortly thereafter. That’s because this football game was held on Guadalcanal, part of the string of Solomon Islands in the South Pacific, where Allied forces established a base of operations that helped turn the tide of World War II. The island was swampy, muddy, and teeming with visible clouds of tiny bloodsucking and malaria-spreading insects, which is how this tilt got its ruefully amusing nickname.
As the very last veterans of World War II slip away from the world, Berg says he wanted to create a kind of cinematic memorial for present-day generations, to highlight not just the valor but the humanity of those who fought. “I want their sons and their grandchildren to understand. I don’t think that’s a message that can be overstated,” he tells Esquire.
Bill Skarsgård as Bob Baumann and Nicholas Galitzine as John McLaughry, taking cover during battle.
With World War II building toward its agonizing end, two U.S. Marine regiments—the 4th and 29th—were among the many gathering on Guadalcanal for the final Allied push toward mainland Japan, a route that would take them to an even bloodier battle on the faraway island of Okinawa. Among these Marines were many young men who had been famous college athletes, who would’ve had futures in pro ball had they not been drawn into military service. So to boost morale on Christmas Eve in 1944, a gridiron was drawn on a flatland of gravel and coral fragments, makeshift goalposts were erected, and a scrimmage was held between the two units.
The movie focuses on four central figures: Nicholas Galitzine as quarterback John McLaughry, team captain at Brown University; Bill Skarsgård as University of Wisconsin tackle Bob Baumann; Ray Nicholson as Purdue fullback Tony Butkovich; and Tom Francis as David Schreiner, a defensive end and captain of the Wisconsin team. For many of the men, who were only a few years removed from being boys, it was the last football game they’d ever play.
The Mosquito Bowl is a fusion of two of Berg’s specialties as a storyteller: football and combat. In addition to Friday Night Lights, he directed 2013’s Lone Survivor, about a Navy SEAL mission in Afghanistan, and as an actor he costarred in the haunting 1992 drama A Midnight Clear, another World War II tale drawn from true life that takes place at Christmas. Netflix will release the new movie in theaters on October 30, with plans to put it on the streaming service a month later on November 25, the day before Thanksgiving.
Peter Berg, right, directs a moment of conflict between the Marines in a behind-the-scenes moment from The Mosquito Bowl.
“What we’re aspiring to do with The Mosquito Bowl is take the audience on an immersive, visceral experience through the eyes of these four young men into the realities of war, the horrors of war—without politicizing it,” Berg says. “I believe World War II was a very just war, certainly when you look at it compared to other wars, but it was a war. And it was an incredibly tragic and brutal experience that these men went through.”
The four young men we follow in The Mosquito Bowl were each stellar athletes with impossibly bright futures, who never expected that their lives might end abruptly even as they shipped overseas to join the war. Berg says his film underscores for a new generation that normal, everyday life can become a harrowing fight for survival in no time, as the various horrifying conflicts currently raging illustrate. “We have certainly not come far from the place we were as a warring planet in 1942 to where we are in 2026,” he says.
It’s also fitting that The Mosquito Bowl is a story of found brotherhood, since the book on which it is based was penned in 2022 by Buzz Bissinger, the Pulitzer prize-winning journalist best known for writing the nonfiction book that also inspired Friday Night Lights.
“I don’t have any brothers, so Buzz is close to a brother for me,” Berg says. The two have known each other “since birth,” the filmmaker adds. Their families were friends in New York when they were both boys, and when Berg went to college in St. Paul, Bissinger, who is a few years older, was already working as a reporter at the city’s newspaper, which deepened their bond at a time when most men see their childhood relationships begin to fray.
Berg says he and Bissinger began talking about The Mosquito Bowl long before the book was even finished. “We would talk about his research, and that would inevitably lead us to a conversation about our fathers.”
Tom Francis as Dave Schreiner is bear-hugged by Ray Nicholson’s Tony Butkovich after a successful play in the Guadalcanal game.
One reason he wanted to tell this World War II story on the big screen is because the men who lived through that era of history were not the best at telling their own stories. “That generation bottled up so many feelings and memories and just had no skill set to talk about them,” Berg says. “What they experienced was horrific, and they had no ability to speak about that, which is one of the reasons that Buzz wrote the book.
“His father, Harry Bissinger, fought in Okinawa. My father, Larry Berg, is buried in Arlington, and he was in the Marine Corps during the Korean War,” the filmmaker adds. “Buzz and I used to talk all the time about how our dads just sucked at communicating—about almost everything but certainly about their time in the Marine Corps.”
Stoicism is the privilege of survivors, of course. In the case of the Mosquito Bowl, many of the key participants simply couldn’t share their experiences because they didn’t live beyond the war. “On the southern tip of Okinawa, there’s a massive memorial with 350,000 names of Americans, Japanese, and the civilians who were all killed during that battle,” he says.
The Mosquito Bowl focuses on four Marines in particular, only one of whom survived the war.
Ray Nicholson, Tom Francis, Bill Skarsgård, and Nicholas Galitzine in The Mosquito Bowl.
Nicholas Galitzine as Lt. John McLaughry.
Nicholas Galitzine as Lt. John McLaughry
“John McLaughry was a classic All-American football hero prior to Pearl Harbor,” Berg says. “He was very educated, very intelligent. He was a quarterback and a running back, and he played defense back then. Everyone played all three positions. He was madly in love with his girlfriend, Jane,” who is played in the film by Ella Newton.
“His father was his coach at Brown,” Berg adds. “He was a painter. He was 21 years old, and he was just beginning to blaze, as were they all. He was a young man with an incredible future. And like the other players in our movie and thousands of other American men, the second Pearl Harbor went down, they dropped everything and volunteered.”
Galitzine, best known for Masters of the Universe and Red, White and Royal Blue, said he studied McLaughry’s painting for insight into the man. “I think of how beautiful John’s art was,” Galitzine tells Esquire. “It really spoke to his essence and the fact he was so many things, not just a football player.”
Being a keen observer was one of the things that made McLaughry a great quarterback and undoubtedly became a vital skill on the battlefield. “I believe it’s possibly the most complex game in sports, certainly the quarterback position. The play calling, formations, and instinctual decision-making are fascinating,” Galitzine says.
To the actor, that’s what makes the Mosquito Bowl so compelling. “I want to understand what it felt like to play in that famous game, given how grotesque the backdrop was around it,” Galitzine says. “To experience hell each day but play a game which held such a special place in their heart must have been incredibly surreal.”
Bill Skarsgård as Bob Baumann.
Bill Skarsgård as 1st Lt. Bob Baumann
“Baumann was probably the flashiest, biggest force of life, who thought he was Buck from The Call of the Wild. He quotes Jack London from that book in the movie,” Berg says. “It’s a paragraph about the warrior spirit and what ‘kill or be killed’ truly means.”
Like the other ballplayers who went to war, this character had a naivete that was blasted away, the filmmaker says. “Baumann is like the other guys. He thought he understood what that meant prior to getting off the ship and trying to get onto the island of Tarawa. After 90 seconds of combat on Tarawa, he realized that it really was much different than he imagined it, that it was brutal. And you see that clearly when he actually kills a man. You see on his face that it was nothing like he imagined it would be.”
Skarsgård’s face alone is something moviegoers don’t often see. As Pennywise in the IT movies and Welcome to Derry series and the archaic, shadowy Count Orlok in Nosferatu, his true visage is usually obscured. “I expected that there was an extremely talented and charismatic human under that makeup and under those masks. And I wanted a part of it,” Berg says.
The actor went deep with his research prior to shooting, even visiting the historic site of the battle on Okinawa. “It’s a playground today, opposite a parking lot in Naha,” Skarsgård tells Esquire.
Baumann’s bigheartedness was something he tried to emulate. “Bob seemed kind, loyal and liked by many,” Skarsgård adds. “He lost his father at a young age and had to take care of both his mother Bertha and younger brother Frank. They were children of the Depression and had to grow up hard and fast.”
He also found himself struck by Baumann’s optimism and plans for the future. “I remember reading about his correspondence with his girlfriend Arlene, talking about what he wanted to do after the war,” Skarsgård says. “He said he wanted to maybe give pro ball a chance if he had the opportunity, to save up some money for what he really wanted to do: open a sports camp for children. That moved me.”
Ray Nicholson as Tony Butkovich.
Ray Nicholson as Cpl. Tony Butkovich
“Butkovich was arguably the best college football player alive in 1941. He was the best running back. He was a man among boys,” Berg says.
As a player, he scored 16 touchdowns to set a record for Purdue in 1943 and led the nation in rushing. “Butkovich came from a Croatian family. Seven brothers, one sister, with two parents, who grew up in a three-bedroom house. Butkovich was just a big, tough, lovable athlete who was a hero to all the kids in the neighborhood.”
Given that Butkovich counted as a celebrity among the spectators to the real Mosquito Bowl, Berg says he needed an actor with outsize charisma. “Ray is really a joy to watch for me,” the director says. Nicholson also grew up with a rare perspective on celebrity as the son of Jack Nicholson. “Ray’s got his own way. He’s not his father. He’s truly not,” Berg adds. “But the energy is there.”
Nicholson, best known for Smile 2 and Novocaine, tells Esquire his dad indirectly played a crucial role in this performance. “Tony kept correspondence with a few people while he was deployed, his mother chief among this group. Despite having a huge family and being a self-defined momma’s boy, Tony made sure to remain pen pals with a young fan. An eight-year-old boy who knew more about Tony’s playing career than Tony himself did,” he says.
That anecdote isn’t really part of the movie, so at first it just seems like just an interesting background detail. “While we were going through camera rehearsals, this innocuous fact became a key to the character,” Nicholson says. “I felt, for whatever reason, I wasn’t worthy of stepping into Butkovich’s shoes. I was missing something. I could feel it when the camera was on me.”
Ray Nicholson in a flashback scene from before the war.
That’s when Jack became part of the equation. Ray began putting pen to paper in a similar way, imagining his old man as a young kid. “My father was born in 1937. While he wouldn’t have been as old as this young fan, I took the opportunity to write letters to my dad as a child throughout the whole experience. For once, I could be his hero,” Nicholson says. “That was my fuel for carrying myself with an intense grace befitting of a hero.”
The Mosquito Bowl was like a last grasp at normalcy for all of them. “I feel like this is the juxtaposition that jolts the fall from innocence of these characters,” Nicholson says. “From immortals on the gridiron to boys dying on foreign soil.”
Tom Francis as First Lt. David Schreiner.
Tom Francis as 1st Lt. David Schreiner
Schreiner had a history with Butkovich and an intense rivalry from their football days. When Butkovich set his record, Schreiner was on the opposing team. Failing to stop him still stung, even years later.
“He was very much an intellectual. He was really smart and madly in love with his fiancée Odette [played by Lola Bond], who he deeply regretted not marrying before he left. He was constantly talking about his unborn children and at a certain point during his experience in Tarawa realized that might not happen. He was almost obsessive in his overthinking, which is what got him into trouble with the Butkovich play. He wasn’t sure whether they were going to go for the win or go for the record, and he made the wrong bet.”
But that marks the difference between an opponent and an enemy. In the Marines, they were on the same side. And the Mosquito Bowl gave them one more chance to play together.
“What strikes me is how young they all were and how little of life they got to experience,” Francis says. “They only dreamt of what they could become and didn’t get a chance to try and fulfill those dreams. I feel like it’s a reminder that you have no idea what’s in store for your life or future, and it makes you think about what you’re doing with the time you’ve been given and what kind of legacy you would want to leave.”
Football is nowhere near an equivalent to actual war, but Francis thinks The Mosquito Bowl uses play to underscore the value of peacetime. “The football feels like a reminder of who these men were before the war,” he says. “Their joy playing the game, their youth.”
Berg believes the general public needs reminders of that, especially with conflagrations flaring around the world. “It’s a very clear and present threat to our young men and women serving,” he says. “We should be respectful and aware of what’s going on.”
Tom Francis as Dave Schreiner and Bill Skarsgård as Bob Baumann.
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