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7th August 2025
03:34pm BST
September 5, the incredibly gripping thriller that was nominated at the Golden Globes and the Oscars earlier this year, is finally available to watch at home.
Co-written and directed by Tim Fehlbaum (Hell) and streaming via NOW and Paramount+, the movie chronicles the terrorist attack during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich.
Unlike other movies about the topic, however, the film is told entirely from the perspective of the ABC Sports broadcasting crew (led by Peter Sarsgaard, Presumed Innocent). The broadcasting team thought they were going to be covering the Olympics, but ended up providing live coverage to the world of the ongoing hostage situation.
Alongside Sarsgaard, September 5 also stars Ben Chaplin (Mad Dogs), John Magaro (The Agency) and Leonie Benesch (Late Shift).
The movie was released in Irish and UK cinemas in February 2025. It was nominated at the Golden Globes in the Best Motion Picture - Drama category and at the Oscars for Best Original Screenplay.
At the time of its theatrical release, JOE said of the film: "Brilliantly acted and nail-bitingly tense, September 5 succeeds as both a claustrophobic ticking-clock thriller and a fascinating portrayal of how a newsroom covers a crisis."
We also had the opportunity to speak to the director and the lead actors about how the movie came to be.
A Swiss director, Fehlbaum told us that he became interested in the real-life historical events while studying film in Munich.
However, it was only when he met with the real-life Geoffrey Mason (played by Magaro), who served as head of the ABC Sports control room on that fateful day, that he came up with the movie's unique approach to the story.
"It came from a conversation that we had with someone who really experienced that, who was in that room working as a young man for ABC Sports, coming into the studio thinking there would be another day reporting on the Olympics and then suddenly this tragedy happened," the director explained.
"He was in that control room during all these hours, during this 22-hour marathon of broadcasting. He experienced how they made that switch as a sports broadcast crew to report on the dramatic situation.
"Listening to his stories and learning what challenges they faced, what questions were asked in the control room, that seemed so relevant and so also worth a movie."
The movie depicts a major turning point in journalism towards a 24-hour news cycle - something we also discussed with the cast.
On this topic, Sarsgaard told JOE: "[My character] Roone Arledge (president of ABC Sports) was really about trying to get the most eyes on the channel as possible. He started off doing that with sports, and he was quite effective with Wide World of Sports and then the Olympics.
"Then he took that into straight news, and there was quite a bit of entertainment in his news and celebrity anchors and things like that.
"I think this was a moment where better intentions were involved, where Roone really was just trying to tell this story in the best way possible. It was when they realised afterwards how many people had tuned in to watch this that they tried to repeat it in the future with live coverage of these events.
"And why do we need live coverage of a hostage crisis? I mean, certainly, the people trying to help in the crisis need to know what's going on minute by minute. But I'm not sure that news helps with that, and a lot of the time, news becomes part of the story."
His co-star Ben Chaplin, who plays Marvin Bader, ABC Sports' head of operations, added: "Or [news] changes the outcome and we'll never know whether it did or not, right? Because it happened."
For more from our interviews with the September 5 cast, click here.
The movie has been newly made available to stream in Ireland and the UK via the services NOW and Paramount+.
