A new documentary centered on Stephen Curry’s record-breaking 4,000th career three-pointer will hit IMAX theaters exclusively on Oct. 9, ESPN Films and IMAX announced Thursday.
The film, Portrait of an Artist: Stephen Curry, directed by Gotham Chopra, co-founder of Religion of Sports, centers on the Warriors’ 130-104 win over the Sacramento Kings at Chase Center in March 2025, when Curry entered needing just two three-pointers to become the first player in NBA history to reach 4,000 career three-pointers. And Curry got there.
Rather than build a full biography around that moment, the documentary uses the game as its spine, weaving Curry’s own reflections on his upbringing and work ethic with perspectives from artists like Viola Davis, Rick Rubin, Patti Smith, and Jon Batiste.
“With Portrait of an Artist, we wanted to tell a story that goes beyond breaking a record on the court, while exploring the creativity, discipline, and mindset behind the journey,” Unanimous Media’s Erick Peyton and Curry said in a joint statement. “This film is our way of capturing what it feels like to experience Stephen’s performance in real time, especially for those who haven’t had or may never have the chance.”
“This film is all about capturing Steph Curry, an athlete and artist who is always chasing a new masterpiece. With the court as his canvas, we wanted to show the world the relentless creativity and discipline that drives one of the greatest to ever play the game,” added Chopra.
Chopra also offered a fuller account of how the film came together in his own Instagram post, revealing that Curry set one condition from the outset: whatever they made had to be built around something artistic, not another standard career retrospective. That note eventually became the pitch Chopra brought to IMAX, an unscripted film built around a single game, with Curry’s performance itself serving as the canvas.
IMAX’s John Turner didn’t need much convincing, according to Chopra.
The company’s last major solo basketball documentary was Michael Jordan to the Max, a 46-minute film built around Jordan’s final championship season with the Bulls, originally released in 2000 and remastered for a 20th-anniversary IMAX re-release in 2020. Chopra said some of the camera operators on Curry’s shoot were the same ones who worked on the original Jordan film.
“In our algorithmic, trend-obsessed industry, we’ve gone counter-culture, a feature-length unscripted doc meant for the biggest screen,” Chopra wrote, tying the release to what he called “the summer of IMAX,” alongside Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, and revealed that Nolan himself makes an appearance in Portrait of an Artist.
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Portrait of an Artist: Stephen Curry opens in IMAX theaters nationwide on Oct. 9.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.