Eddie the Eagle

Dexter Fletcher's Eddie the Eagle opened in 2016 as a UK-American co-production, with Matthew Vaughn as one of the producers. The film consolidated Fletcher, primarily known until then as a British character actor (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels), as a director of unexpectedly solid commercial features; he would go on to Rocketman three years later.

Eddie Edwards (Taron Egerton, in his lead role following Kingsman) is a myopic British plasterer with no obvious athletic profile who, against the strenuous opposition of the British Olympic Association, talks his way to the 1988 Calgary Olympics as Britain's first ski-jumper in sixty years. Hugh Jackman plays his fictional drunken-mentor coach Bronson Peary; Christopher Walken appears in a small supporting role as Peary's own former mentor; Iris Berben plays the German training-hill manageress; Jim Broadbent plays a sceptical BOA member.

The film operates as broad underdog crowd-pleaser in the British Cool Runnings register. Matthew Margeson's score, the period reconstruction of late-1980s European ski-jumping infrastructure, and Egerton's central physical performance (he trained on real ski-jump structures, though the actual jumps were largely doubled) anchor a film whose tonal commitment is genuinely earnest. The actual Eddie Edwards remained a continuing minor public figure across the years that followed; the film's modest commercial success extended his recognition in the UK and US.