Thursday, August 27, 2026
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The director Peter Berg made one of your favorite war movies: Lone Survivor. He’s behind what’s definitely your favorite football film, Friday Night Lights. This fall, he's pairing elements of the two together in The Mosquito Bowl, which is based on an incredible true story that you really ought to know. The film will hit theaters this October, before it premieres on Netflix in November. Anthony Breznican has the exclusive first look below.—Brady Langmann, senior entertainment editor
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Nicholas Galitzine, Bill Skarsgård, Ray Nicholson, and Tom Francis describe playing long-ago football stars who risked everything to serve.
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Every football fan knows how memorable a postseason college game can be. The Rose Bowl, the Sugar Bowl, the Orange Bowl. In every case, excitement, passions, and enthusiasm run high, but there’s another lesser-known bowl game that was played only once, nearly 82 years ago, but carries even more profound emotional and historical heft. A new Netflix movie called The Mosquito Bowl, from Friday Night Lights filmmaker Peter Berg, aims to bring it to the attention of a new generation.
As the very last veterans of World War II slip away from the world, Berg says he wanted to create a kind of cinematic memorial for present-day generations, to highlight not just the valor but the humanity of those who fought. “I want their sons and their grandchildren to understand. I don’t think that’s a message that can be overstated,” he tells Esquire.
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The first Father’s Day David Lesaffre worked alongside his son, Xander, they cleaned up a suicide. A fourteen-year-old had fled to a friend’s house following an argument with his dad, barricaded himself in his friend’s bedroom, and shot himself in the head. Music was playing so loudly when it happened that the friend—in the next room—said he hadn’t heard the gunshot.
Lesaffre and his wife, Leanne, were just beginning their second careers. Their business, T.A.C.T. 48, is a biohazard-remediation company that specializes in cleaning up grim, often gruesome events. They are paid well for their work, often by insurance, and, at the time, the company was growing. They had only recently made Xander, then fifteen, their first part-time employee. He wasn’t much older than the boy who had died, but in those early days they needed him—and they needed to know if he was cut out for the work. “Being able to train through that, with his parents there, I think was the best course of action to determine if he had the fortitude to help people without allowing your emotions to overtake you,” David says.
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It would happen like this: I’d get an email at 4:15 p.m. that said my roommate was looking at porn—along with a pixelated image of penetration.
We were both members of an accountability group at Southwest Baptist University called Dangerous Men. In fact, he’s the one who introduced me to it. If you were in this group, you were not supposed to watch porn. At all. Everyone in the group had an accountability partner, and you’d have to share your masturbation habits with them. Whenever you were tempted, you were supposed to text your accountability partner and be like, Dude, I’m horny right now. I need you to distract me.
My roommate was my accountability partner, and I was his. While I relied on parental controls, he installed a program called Covenant Eyes onto his computer. The program records your screen, and if you ever watch something that the program thinks is porn—even a YouTube video featuring a person showing too much skin—it takes a blurred-out screenshot and sends it to your accountability partner.
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