By Owen Williams | Posted 18 Dec 2017

Between Michael Jordan's initial retirement from the NBA in 1993 and his comeback in 1995, the basketball superstar made the unlikely decision to start playing baseball instead. That strange interlude is now set to be the subject of a biographical film called The Prospect, which Will Smith is producing.

Jordan made the jump partly to fulfil a promise he made to his father, who died in 1993. Jordan signed with the Birmingham Barons, the Chicago White Sox's minor league team, and later also played for the Scottsdale Scorpions. He acquitted himself well, but eventually returned to basketball.

This period, was, of course, already covered in 1996's Space Jam: an "alternative" recounting of Jordan's lost couple of years, in which he plays a secret intergalactic basketball game in the centre of the Earth with Bugs Bunny and Marvin the Martian. We know which version we prefer to believe.

Ben Epstein wrote the screenplay for The Prospect, which has been knocking around the Black List of buzzy unproduced scripts for a while. The project will come together under Smith's Overlook Entertainment banner, but there's no time frame so far.