ESPN will not air Spike Lee’s docuseries on quarterback Colin Kaepernick | Spike Lee

Director Spike Lee’s multi-part documentary collection for ESPN Movies about former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who sparked a nationwide debate when he protested racial injustice almost a decade in the past, won’t be launched, the filmmaker and ESPN mentioned.

“ESPN, Colin Kaepernick and Spike Lee have collectively determined to now not proceed with this venture because of sure artistic variations,” ESPN mentioned in an announcement to Reuters on Saturday. “Regardless of not reaching finality, we respect all of the laborious work and collaboration that went into this movie.”

Lee informed Reuters on Friday that the collection was not going to be launched.

“It’s not popping out. That’s all I can say,” Lee mentioned on the purple carpet forward of the Harold and Carole Pump Basis dinner, a fundraiser for most cancers analysis and therapy, in Beverly Hills, California.

Requested why, the Oscar-winning director declined to elaborate, citing a nondisclosure settlement. “I can’t. I signed a nondisclosure. I can’t discuss it”.

Kaepernick ignited a nationwide debate in 2016 when he knelt through the US nationwide anthem to protest systemic racism and police brutality. The 37-year-old has not performed within the NFL since that season. Many specialists believed his political activism, which triggered a motion that drew the ire of Donald Trump, was the important thing motive groups had been cautious of signing him. He later filed a collusion grievance in opposition to group house owners, which was settled with the league in 2019.

Representatives for Kaepernick didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.

Manufacturing on the collection started in 2022, with Walt Disney-owned ESPN touting it as a “full, first-person account” of Kaepernick’s journey that might characteristic intensive interviews with the participant.

Final yr, Puck Information reported the venture confronted delays amid disagreements between Kaepernick and Lee over the route of the movie.

The collection is co-produced by Jemele Hill, a former ESPN reporter who was suspended by the community in 2017, after she instructed that followers who disagreed with criticism of NFL gamers taking a knee from the proprietor of the Dallas Cowboys ought to boycott the group’s advertisers. A month earlier, she had enraged the White Home when she tweeted: “Donald Trump is a white supremacist who has largely surrounded himself w/ different white supremacists.”

The community’s resolution to drop the collection comes because the Trump administration has sued broadcasters that reported critically on the president and pushed personal companies and colleges to finish variety, fairness and inclusion initiatives that the federal government now defines as illegal discrimination in opposition to white People.

In December, Disney’s ABC Information agreed to pay $15m to a basis and museum to be established by Trump as a part of a settlement in a defamation lawsuit Trump filed in opposition to the community.