Who Killed the Montreal Expos? is a Netflix documentary of an entire city's unresolved grief

Twenty years later, we're still asking the wrong question: Who killed the Montreal Expos?

The Netflix documentary had a packed house and standing ovation at a Cinéma du Musée-hosted Festival du Nouveau Cinéma (FNC) world premiere on October 9 before it would be released globally October 21. It dangles the promise of a whodunit. The title demands answers, and the trailer teases villains, but director Jean-François Poisson knows something the rest of us are still learning: this was never about solving a crime.

"It's not an unsolved crime," Poisson told a packed house at the FNC world premiere. "It's unresolved grief."

That distinction matters, because for two decades, Montrealers who know the pain of losing the Expos have been stuck in their anger, pointing fingers at Jeffrey Loria, at David Samson, at Claude Brochu, at Lucien Bouchard, at Major League Baseball, and at one another to some extent. We've been so busy assigning blame that we never actually processed the loss.

The documentary offers closure for some and permission for others to finally feel out that we didn't just lose a baseball team, but a piece of our identity we'd built with our own hands. The team came to mean something beyond wins and losses. Non-fans wear the logo to this day, though these days with this documentary, they're more like mourning veils.

The Expos were Montreal's team, yes, but they were also proof we belonged in the big leagues. The first MLB franchise outside the United States, established in 1969, this team was playing a sport Quebecers had been perfecting for 60 years before anyone thought to give us a professional club. "It was a cultural phenomenon," Poisson told Netflix, describing the Expos as transcending sports and being woven into the city's identity. "Even people who weren't familiar with the game were Expos fans. The logo was, and still is, everywhere."

What the film is about

The film takes you back to 1994, when the Expos had the best record in baseball: 74-40, six games up on Atlanta, loaded with future Hall of Famers in Pedro Martínez, Larry Walker, Vladimir Guerrero. It was the kind of roster built by scouting smarter than teams with ten times your budget.

When a strike hit in August that year, and the World Series got cancelled, and the fragile economics holding the whole thing together just snapped. What followed was a fire sale, and before the 1995 season even started, players like Ken Hill, John Wetteland, Marquis Grissom, Larry Walker were all gone, followed by Pedro and Vlad not long after.

The documentary lays out the familiar names and the complicated business decisions, stadium plans that never happened, and the ownership groups that couldn't make the math work. But sitting in that theatre at the FNC, watching fans cry on screen at that final game on September 29, 2004, you realize the facts don't actually matter.

"In every interview in Quebec, and even in the U.S., the vocabulary people used was 'killed,' 'murdered,' 'mourning,'" Poisson told La Presse. "It's the language of a criminal investigation."

So he structured it that way with suspects, testimonies, conflicting accounts. He got Brochu, the diplomat who won't quite say what he means; he got Samson, Loria's stepson, who says exactly what he means and doesn't care who it pisses off; he got the players, still heartbroken; he got Alexandre Pratt, La Presse's columnist who covered the slow-motion collapse, to say what everyone already knows: "The answer is money."

But that's the short answer.

The real answer is more complicated, and it has to do with Quebec values bumping up against American business culture. With a city that wanted to do things our way—smaller payrolls, smarter drafting, community ownership—in a league that stopped caring about any of that the moment TV contracts exploded.

"We maybe lost this team," Poisson reflected during the FNC Q&A, "but they tried. Even if they made bad decisions sometimes, you can't take away that some people really tried to keep it. They tried to keep it while holding onto our Quebec values. Even though we lost, we can still be proud."

The Expos didn't fail because Montreal didn't care enough, they failed because we cared differently, as we wanted a team built on scouting brilliance and player development. The Expos (thanks in part to beloved manager Felipe Alou) drafted or developed Hall of Famers like Dawson, Carter, Raines, Martinez, Walker, Guerrero, and Randy Johnson while the rest of baseball was learning you could just buy championships if you had the cash. We got outspent, outmaneuvered, and out... American-businessmanned?

When former mayor Denis Coderre stood up during the Q&A to praise the film's audacity, he made a point: "We didn't kill the Expos. We lost the Expos." It's a subtle distinction that while one implies guilt, the other implies grief.

WARNING: Spoilers ahead

The documentary streams in 190 countries on October 21, 2025 which means the world gets to see a very Quebec story that's bilingual, proudly local, and refuses to sand down its edges for mass appeal. Netflix gave Poisson carte blanche: No notes on the narrative, no pressure to make it more "global," no demand to cut the French dialogue that makes up more than half the film.

"They really didn't try to neutralize it," Poisson said at the premiere. "It was important that the Quebec touch came through."

The result is a film that probably won't give you the satisfying conclusion the title promises. You won't walk away knowing definitively who killed the Expos, because that's not really the point of the film. You'll walk away understanding why, 20 years later, a city is still wearing that logo, why people were crying at the FNC premiere, and why a documentary about a defunct baseball team feels less like sports history and more like a grief counselling session.

"After seeing this, what do we do?" asked Jean Allard of Joueurs sur les buts at the world premiere, a grassroots group actively working to bring baseball back to Montreal. "Do we work to bring them back? Or do we live in the past and ruminate on nostalgia for another 20 years?"

Maybe the answer is both. Maybe you can't move forward until you've actually looked back—not with anger, not with blame, but with the kind of clear-eyed honesty that says: yes, we lost something that mattered. Yes, it still hurts. Yes, we're allowed to feel that.

The Expos are gone, and the grief is real. Maybe, finally, we can start talking about what comes next.