The information gleaned from newsletters, if you can curate them correctly, is invaluable. One of my favorites is Offball, which brings me info on sports like pop culture I don’t find elsewhere.
This week was a little ditty about “Marty Supreme” and the misframed message of it’s what…it’s a story framed around table tennis, not a film designed to make table tennis a global sports powerhouse. Here is the paragraph.
You may be exhausted by the oversaturation now, but you still have to admit they crushed the entire go-to-market strategy from fake Zoom calls to fashion collabs to Timothée’s all-conquering press tour. And now that we have proof of concept, we’re seeing calls to make other ping pong movies. Which is fine, but it’s a pitch that misses the point. Lightning rarely strikes twice. It’s not even that Lily Zhang doesn’t deserve a movie (she does), but the framing is all wrong. Marty Supreme isn’t special because it’s a ping pong movie.
Many times, when great films based around sport come out, the jump is quickly made to “this will lift our sport to new heights.” Rare does that happen if ever.
Did “Miracle” drive more people to play or watch hockey? Not really, but the Olympic hockey success did. Did “F1 The Movie” make more people run to be Formula 1 fans this year? I think it was good and taught me some things, but did people really suddenly start watching races? Probably not (the reality is that ‘Drive to Survive” made more people interested because those were real life stories that can be followed when the series ended.) Did “Rocky” or all its sequels (I worked on Creed 2, so I have a little insight here) make more people want to follow or watch or actually box for the long term? “Days of Thunder” raise people to be NASCAR Fans for a long time? Meh. The PBR did a great job last year of building off of what was called “The Yellowstone Effect” to build a larger narrative tied to lifestyle and bull riding, but did that put more people on bulls? Not really, but that wasn’;’t the goal. We loved the story of these people around the frame of sports…its ups and downs, its powerful arcs, its messaging and then we move on. They are fictional, feel-good stories.
Now the real-life serialization done around series like “Hard Knocks” is different. Like the F1 series we can learn more about the reality of actual people we follow and aspire to learn more while being inspired by those in real life through the access that we receive on the device we choose. That is an amazing way when done right, do both inform and lead a core group of enthusiasts while attracting others.
Back to “Marty Supreme” or “Hoosiers” or “Million Dollar Baby” or “Any Given Sunday,” that use the fictional metaphors of sport with largely fictional characters to tell a bigger story. There are MANY ways for real life organizations, leagues and athletes to take advantage of a fictional story or a historically based one to inspire and have people learn more. With “The Boys in the Boat” we worked on a project with USA Rowing to do screenings and raise funds by bringing the actors together with those who are involved at a high level today as well as doing screenings for kids in inner cities to see the film and maybe…maybe take up the sport for life. For “The Way Back,” a film about a challenged high school hoops coach, we worked with the film producers to build out a series of talks about mental health and athlete challenges that was very successful.
There are plenty other ways for entities to take advantage of a film based on sports bump. Any scene needs extras and those who can make scenes look real. Those people all played at some level…did you know that Tracy McGrady has a cameo in “Marty Supreme” as a Harlem Globetrotter, sems like there is a substory to be told there…and they all have their own backstory that can be told in various ways, but it takes work and dedication and listening to dissect and do.
Sometimes people are too challenged to ask the questions and do that work, but when it is done right, everyone wins. Bit players aren’t bit players, the film or the series does get an ancillary bounce beyond its projected reach, relationships are built and wider storytelling happens…and its fun.
So, will more people take up table tennis because of the film? That’s a long-term goal, but the short term goal should be to make sure every element of the film is used to the advantage of the enthusiast to reinforce and retell the story not just to a new audience but to the core. They become evangelists for the submessages and the consumers. It’ not celebrity ping pong, its marketing and building a base for the longer term.
Sometimes it works, sometimes we just want to enjoy the film, framed by a sports metaphor. Hard to lose either way, but that’s how if the right people are involved, it can work well.
Step Ahead, Not Back, As We Move to ’26…