Spike Lee was reportedly hard at work on a documentary series for ESPN featuring ex-NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, until it was scrapped.
“ESPN, Colin Kaepernick, and Spike Lee have collectively decided to no longer proceed with this project as a result of certain creative differences,” ESPN said in a statement. “Despite not reaching finality, we appreciate all the hard work and collaboration that went into this film.”
The series was supposed to chronicle Kaepernick’s career with the San Francisco 49ers, which ended in 2016 when his dedication to social justice causes overtook his dedication to his sport. Most famously, Kaepernick began kneeling during the national anthem before games to protest racial injustice in America.
He has been unable to sign with any other team since, and in 2019 he reached a confidential settlement with the NFL after filing a grievance that accused the league of actively working against him to keep him unemployed.
BlazeTV host Jason Whitlock has his theories as to why the documentary series didn’t work out.
“Spike Lee is not talking about why. He signed an NDA — nondisclosure agreement. He got paid, got his money, so he’s going to keep his mouth shut,” Whitlock says.
“I think more than anything, there were all these people that were promising Colin Kaepernick, ‘Man, you’re going to go down in history. It doesn’t matter what they say now. Fifty years from now, people are going to be talking about you like you were MLK,’” he continues.
“And here we are just nine years from 2016, and Colin Kaepernick is a laughingstock. … And so they just scrapped the whole thing that Spike Lee was going to do. It was just going to cause a bunch of negative publicity. The Colin Kaepernick psyop is a failure,” he says. “That’s my takeaway.”
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