Kevin Costner’s Field Of Dreams Was Almost Remade With Marvel’s Chris Pratt

Chris Pratt nearly starred in a “Field of Dreams” remake that never came to fruition, according to new reporting from Puck’s Lesley Goldberg. In a feature for the website titled “The Best and Worst Deals of the Peak TV Era,” Puck News revealed that “Guardians of the Galaxy” star Pratt was at one point slated to head up a Peacock series remake of the 1989 sports film, but reportedly “abruptly” dropped out of the project.

The TV show version was initially going to be developed by Mike Schur, the comedy mastermind behind shows like “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” “The Good Place,” and the show that gave Pratt his breakout role, “Parks and Recreation.” When the show was initially announced in 2021, Lisa Katz, the President of NBCUniversal Television and Streaming, said that “Field of Dreams” has “remained a fan favorite” for years, and that Schur was the right person to tackle the project. “It’s whimsical and grounded, a space where Mike Schur excels, and we’re looking forward to bringing a new version of this classic to Peacock,” she said in a statement at the time.

According to Deadline, the show received a straight-to-series order, and it was announced soon after the original movie re-entered the zeitgeist thanks to a “Field of Dreams” themed Major League Baseball game that had drawn in stellar ratings the week before. Interestingly, Pratt’s name was seemingly never reported in relation to the series, and this scoop from Puck comes two years after we learned that it wasn’t going to move forward after all. In June 2022, TVLine noted that the project was going to be shopped around by Universal Television, but nothing ever came of that.

A show from Schur would typically be a slam-dunk, but this news wasn’t exactly surprising at the time. Peacock has faced more public struggles than some of its streaming competitors, with losses totalling $2.8 billion by the end of 2023, according to Variety. Great shows like the Rian Johnson “Columbo” riff “Poker Face” and Schur-produced Indigenous comedy “Rutherford Falls” haven’t been enough to push the streamer into a good place, business-wise (although the 2024 Summer Olympics seemed to have helped), and by the time the “Field of Dreams” news broke, the streamer was already on the cusp of canceling some great shows.

Now, though, the news from Puck reframes the entire story of how “Field of Dreams” struck out at Peacock. According to the outlet, Pratt was attached to the project but dropped out suddenly, and Schur seemed to have left at some point, too. Goldberg says that although Schur had a five-year deal with NBCUniversal valued at $125 million, someone named Bill Heck was tapped to replace him on “Field of Dreams,” but as an industry newcomer, he was “deemed insufficient” to carry the show’s hefty price tag. It’s worth noting that while there’s an actor named Bill Heck who’s starred in projects like “Locke & Key” and “The Old Man,” Puck doesn’t indicate whether or not this is the same Bill Heck who was poised to work on the “Field of Dreams” update.

Regardless, it sounds like “Field of Dreams” 2.0 fell apart for reasons beyond Pratt dropping out. The series apparently had a per-episode price tag of $15 million (oh, how I miss the days when the reported $12 million pilot of “Lost” was a record-breaker), which seems like it would’ve been unsustainable even if it hadn’t been set to stream on Peacock. Puck also says that Schur really wanted to shoot parts of the show at Fenway Park, an iconic real-life baseball field that no doubt would’ve come with a major price tag if included in the show.

Pratt hasn’t commented on the “Field of Dreams” news yet, and while we don’t know why he left the project, he’s certainly remained busy in the years since. In addition to reprising the role of Peter Quill in “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3,” Pratt has voiced popular enduring characters (to mixed reviews) in “The Super Mario Bros Movie” and “Garfield,” and headlines the popular military thriller “The Terminal List” on Prime Video.

Would Pratt, who once played a baseball star in “Moneyball,” have made a good Ray Kinsella? Kevin Costner played the farmer who received a heavenly vision telling him to build a baseball field in the 1989 original, and while Pratt doesn’t exactly possess the same rugged charm as Costner, his casting here makes much more sense than in something like “The Super Mario Bros Movie.” It also makes sense that his name would’ve been kept out of the press at the time: pretty much every Pratt-related casting announcement in recent years has been met with an outcry for one reason or another (his personal beliefs, his acting, his inability to do an Italian accent). The same could’ve happened with “Field of Dreams,” but there’s also a chance the show could’ve been good.

We’ll almost certainly never know: the clock is running out on Schur’s five-year deal with Universal, and based on this new report, “Field of Dreams” never even made it up to bat. I guess we’ll never know if audiences would come to this show, because Peacock never actually built it.