Charles Stone III’s 2024 sports comedy casts Snoop Dogg as a disgraced former NFL star sentenced to coach a pee-wee team in Long Beach, a premise drawn from the youth league the rapper has run in Southern California since 2005.

The Underdoggs is a 2024 American sports comedy directed by Charles Stone III and written by Danny Segal and Isaac Schamis, with Snoop Dogg both in the lead and on the list of producers. It premiered on January 26, 2024 as a Prime Video exclusive from Amazon MGM Studios, after a planned theatrical release was dropped. Around Snoop Dogg the cast brings together Tika Sumpter, Mike Epps, George Lopez, Andrew Schulz, Kal Penn and Kandi Burruss, plus a squad of young actors who play the team.

A washed-up star, a court order and a pee-wee team

Snoop Dogg plays Jaycen “Two Js” Jennings, a former NFL wide receiver whose career ended badly after he was thrown out of the league for poor sportsmanship. When a car accident puts him in front of a judge, played by Kandi Burruss, he is ordered to do community service in his hometown of Long Beach, California. The assignment is to coach the Underdoggs, a struggling youth football team whose players turn out to be just as blunt and foul-mouthed as he is.

Jaycen does not take the job out of generosity. He sees the team as a tool to rebuild his public image, and the comedy rests on the distance between that cynical plan and the kids he actually has to coach. The story adds a personal thread: one of the players is the son of Cherise, Jaycen’s high school sweetheart, played by Tika Sumpter. Mike Epps is Kareem, his best friend, George Lopez plays Coach Feis, and Andrew Schulz is Chip Collins, a former friend turned rival. Snoop Dogg also serves as the narrator.

The second half sets up the classic sports-movie dilemma. Jaycen gets a shot at a comeback in sports television, and the first taping falls on the same day as the team’s big game. How that choice plays out is the film’s final act, and it is not spoiled here.

The real league behind the script

The premise is not pure invention. Snoop Dogg founded the Snoop Youth Football League in 2005 as a program for at-risk kids in Southern California, and by 2018 it was described as the largest youth football organization in the region, with 50 teams and more than 1,500 players. Several of its alumni have reached the NFL, among them quarterback C.J. Stroud, wide receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster and linebacker Daiyan Henley.

The rapper’s coaching goes back even further. In 2003 the Associated Press reported that he was head coach of his son Cordell’s youth football team, and in 2018 Netflix released Coach Snoop, a docuseries that followed him as he coached his team, Snoop’s Steelers, in his own league. “It’s so close to the kids that I coached in real life,” he told the AP when The Underdoggs came out.

To build the character, Snoop Dogg said he looked at wide receivers who had struggled off the field and at coaches known for a confrontational style, citing the late Bobby Knight, the volatile basketball coach who won three NCAA titles at Indiana. “I wanted to do a little research on coaches who had a different approach, that were more verbal and more aggressive towards the kids,” he explained.

From a pitch to an Atlanta shoot

The idea was pitched by Snoop Dogg and Constance Schwartz-Morini, whose SMAC Productions is one of the companies behind the film. MGM announced the project on August 2, 2022, with Charles Stone III attached to direct and Kenya Barris, the creator of black-ish, among the producers alongside Schwartz-Morini, Mychelle Deschamps and Jonathan Glickman. Snoop Dogg is credited as a producer under his legal name, Calvin Broadus.

The production banners say a lot about the film’s identity: Khalabo Ink Society, the company of Kenya Barris, SMAC Productions, Panoramic Media Company and Death Row Pictures. That last name extends a brand Snoop Dogg acquired in February 2022, Death Row Records, the label that released his 1993 debut album, Doggystyle.

Principal photography began in Atlanta, Georgia, on September 26, 2022, and lasted seven weeks, so although the story takes place in Long Beach, the film was shot on the other side of the country. The ensemble was announced on October 4, with cameras already rolling: Tika Sumpter, Mike Epps, Andrew Schulz and George Lopez, together with the young cast of Jonigan Booth, Adan James Carrillo, Kylah Davila, Caleb Dixon, Alexander Michael Gordon and Shamori Washington. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution put the budget at 30 million dollars.

Behind the camera, the cinematography is by Mitchell Amundsen, the editing by Paul Millspaugh and the music by Joseph Shirley. The finished film runs 96 minutes and is rated R in the United States and 15 in the United Kingdom, which is precisely the point: this is a youth sports comedy made for adults.

Charles Stone III and the sports comedy

Charles Stone III, born in Philadelphia in 1966, is the son of the journalist and Tuskegee Airman Chuck Stone. He came up through music videos for A Tribe Called Quest, Public Enemy and The Roots, and in 1999 he created the “Whassup?” advertising campaign for Budweiser. His first two features arrived in 2002: Paid in Full, a crime drama set in Harlem, and Drumline, which turned a college marching band competition into a sports movie in all but name.

Sport has remained one of his favorite settings. Mr. 3000 (2004) followed an egotistical baseball star played by Bernie Mac, and Uncle Drew (2018) built a basketball comedy around the elderly streetball character that Kyrie Irving first played in a series of Pepsi commercials. The Underdoggs moves him to American football, and to a story in which the team is made up of children. In interviews around the premiere, he said it was the first time he had worked with Snoop Dogg.

Stone also had ties to the producers’ world. He directed episodes of black-ish in 2018 and 2019 and of its spin-off mixed-ish in 2019, a series in which Tika Sumpter starred. Between features he has worked steadily in television, on shows such as Friday Night Lights, Greenleaf, Black Monday and Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist.

Stone has compared the film to The Bad News Bears (1976), the template for any story about a reluctant adult and a team of misfit kids, with one difference: his children swear like adults, which he describes as closer to reality. He also argued that the profanity alone would not carry the film. “The cussing has context. As long as there is an emotional story underneath the bells and whistles of cussing, then that works,” he told the AP.

A cast drawn from comedy, music and television

Snoop Dogg’s acting career goes back to the early 2000s. In 2001 alone he appeared in Training Day, starred in the horror film Bones and teamed up with Dr. Dre in The Wash; he later played Huggy Bear in Starsky & Hutch (2004) and shared the lead with Wiz Khalifa in Mac & Devin Go to High School (2012). The Underdoggs is one of the few films built entirely around him rather than featuring him in a supporting part.

The supporting cast blends stand-up comedy and television. Mike Epps is remembered as Day-Day in Next Friday and Friday After Next; George Lopez headlined his own long-running sitcom; Andrew Schulz is known for MTV2’s Guy Code and the Flagrant podcast; and Kal Penn, of the Harold & Kumar films and House, also worked in the Obama White House. Kandi Burruss was a member of the R&B group Xscape, won a Grammy as a songwriter of TLC’s “No Scrubs” and spent years on The Real Housewives of Atlanta.

Tika Sumpter arrives with the Sonic the Hedgehog films, in which she plays Maddie Wachowski, and with Southside with You (2016), in which she played Michelle Obama and which she also produced. In The Underdoggs her character is Jaycen’s link to the life he had before fame, in the neighborhood he left behind.

From cinemas to streaming

The film was first dated for a theatrical release on October 20, 2023, before being moved to January 26, 2024. In December 2023, the studio decided to skip cinemas altogether and release it as a Prime Video exclusive on that date, a decision linked to the weak box-office performance of R-rated comedies during the summer of 2023.

That route places The Underdoggs in a familiar category of the streaming era: the mid-budget studio comedy that would once have opened in hundreds of multiplexes and now goes straight to a subscription service. Without a box-office run there are no ticket sales to measure it by, and its life depends on the platform’s catalog rather than on an opening weekend.

What it sets out to do

The ambition is clear from the credits: a crowd-pleasing, foul-mouthed comeback story built on Snoop Dogg’s public persona, his Long Beach roots and his real work with young players, in the hands of a director who has spent two decades on sports and music-driven comedy. Tika Sumpter summed up the emotional line as Jaycen “coming back to his first love, which is football, then the community and his first high school sweetheart.”

The image of Snoop Dogg on a sideline has only grown since the premiere. He appeared at the closing ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympics and was later named Team USA’s first honorary coach for the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Games, roles that make Two Js look less like a gag and more like an extension of his public life.

Whether The Underdoggs works as a comedy will depend largely on each viewer’s patience with its premise, a story that leans hard on profanity and on the persona of its star. What the record shows is that it draws more directly on Snoop Dogg’s own life than almost anything else in his filmography, turning two decades of youth football in Southern California into a studio comedy.

Tags: comedies, Prime Video