Richard Jewell 2019

Richard Jewell is a 2019 American biographical drama film directed and produced by Clint Eastwood and written by Billy Ray. It is based on the 1997 Vanity Fair article "American Nightmare: The Ballad of Richard Jewell" by Marie Brenner and the 2019 book The Suspect: An Olympic Bombing, the FBI, the Media, and Richard Jewell, the Man Caught in the Middle by Kent Alexander and Kevin Salwen. The film depicts the July 27, 1996, Centennial Olympic Park bombing and its aftermath, as security guard Richard Jewell finds a bomb during the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia, and alerts authorities to evacuate, only to later be wrongly accused of having placed the device himself. The film stars Paul Walter Hauser as Jewell, Sam Rockwell, Kathy Bates, Jon Hamm, and Olivia Wilde. After its world premiere on November 20, 2019, at AFI Fest, the film was theatrically released in the United States on December 13 by Warner Bros. Pictures. It grossed $44 million against a $45 million budget and received generally positive reviews from critics, with praise for the performances (particularly those of Bates, Rockwell, and Hauser) and Eastwood's direction.