In a 2023 interview with IndieWire, Sean Durkin spoke about why Chris Von Erich is not depicted in the film: "He was in it for a long time, not just a draft. For years. I wrote the script for seven years and Chris was part of it for maybe five of those years. It's really hard on a human level to look at them as characters on the page because they were real people. But at some point as a writer and a filmmaker, you have to say, if I step away and look at it as characters on a page and look at it as a film, there's just a repetition to the deaths of Kerry Von Erich, Mike Von Erich, and Chris, that they all died in the same way, where they either took a gun or pills out into a field and killed themselves. To try and fit the story, which had so much more tragedy even [besides] than that - another tough one was that David Von Erich was a parent and his daughter died when she was a year old. There's just so much tragedy in this family that a film just couldn't sustain it. I ultimately took it out because it seemed like it was the difference between the film getting made or not. [Including Chris] was clearly throwing off the rhythm of the film, the weight of the film, the focus of the film, which was trying to be about Kevin Von Erich's survival but was getting lost in the amount of tragedy. I had to find that balance to make the screenplay work on a level that made it a workable film.