It sure seems like all revenue streams are tapped when it comes to sports media rights. All of the potential players are involved. Cable networks have their corner, streamers carved out a piece for themselves, and tech companies have staked their claim as well. The price tags are through the roof. So what is left? Could it be taking a trip to the movie theaters?
On a recent episode of The Town, AMC Theaters CEO Adam Aron made it clear that he and his colleagues need to be in the sports business.
“We’ve got to get sports rights,” he told host Matt Belloni. “We just got to get sports rights. We’ve been, we’ve been trying for years, mostly unsuccessfully.”
There should be motivation on both sides to get something done. A movie theater can offer fans a communal experience that isn’t focused on constantly spending money on food and drinks. Plus, with all apologies to your favorite local sports bar, a leather recliner beats a sticky booth any day of the week.
Beat the Bubble Back a Bit
Plenty of people in the sports and business worlds have made predictions that this golden age of sports media rights can’t possibly last. Prices can’t keep going up. Soon, there will be no network or tech company with deep enough pockets.
Doing a deal with a theater chain creates a revenue stream no league has ever had before—admission to watch parties. No matter how the deal is structured, it’s still new money.
Aron told Belloni that AMC has put NFL games in movie theaters before, but it was a sub-licensing deal with DirecTV that only allowed theaters to show out-of-market games.
“In Chicago, they don’t want to watch Seattle play Jacksonville, they want to see the Bears and in Denver, they want to see the Broncos,” he said. “…So we’ve been showing the wrong games.”
There are all kinds of ways theaters could structure a deal done directly with the leagues. Think about places like Raleigh, where I live. The Panthers are our NFL home team, but the team doesn’t play its home games here. Targeting markets like this one or Milwaukee, where the Packers are just as popular as they are in Green Bay, could be a gold mine for exhibitioners. That can also mean a gold mine for the league.
Theaters Need Sports
Movie theaters have been living a new reality since Covid shut the world down. Since the pandemic, there have been eleven movies that have made at least $1 billion at the worldwide box office. Forty-seven did it in the years prior to that.
Once-sure-thing film franchises like Marvel and usually reliable genres like horror and animation are stumbling in 2025. If fewer people are seeing the movies, that means fewer people are coming to the theaters. AMC and its top competitors like Regal and Cinemark need to rekindle people’s desire to leave the house.
Movies are missing the mark with their targets more and more. Maybe the events business will change the math for theaters.
National Research Group recently released a study about Gen Alpha (people under 12) and its relationship with movie theaters. The findings will probably surprise you.
Their attention spans are not destroyed. They do not insist on being able to use their phones in the theater. They are capable of enjoying a theater experience the way so many of us did when we were kids. But they want an event. What’s on screen matters, but maybe the communal experience matters to them more.
That should be music to the ears of the NFL, the NBA, and others. Their games are events. If the leagues offer the right products to theater chains, there is a family audience that those businesses can lean on to generate profit.
Who Can Make This Work?
It’s fair to wonder if movie theaters are a potential income stream that’s reserved exclusively for the NFL. The league’s limited schedule makes the product more attractive. Any theater owner would rather be tasked with filling a theater for 18 showings instead of the 82 nights each NBA team or the 162 nights each Major League Baseball team plays.
Even if the NFL is the only one of the big four American leagues that makes sense to offer a weekly package of games, other leagues are not frozen out. Maybe the NBA could offer a theater an All-Star Saturday Night event or Major League Baseball could do the same for the Home Run Derby.
FIFA, an organization never hurting for money, would be wise to look at ways to lean into how most Americans will be watching the World Cup next year. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of soccer fans in this country, but maybe not so many that the people watching and analyzing the game will outnumber the people that want a reason to root for America and get together with friends and family.
The real path to making this work may not be for the leagues to negotiate directly with theater chains. ESPN has tested this with the College Football Playoff in the past. Maybe leagues could push their media rights fees higher if they put in a provision that would allow the rights holders to do these kinds of deals with theater chains. That would open WBD and CBS up to cash in on the Men’s Final Four or for NBC to put something together for some of the Premier League’s top rivalry matches.
Media tastes change, but the popularity of out-of-home viewing never does. Even in an age of people having multiple screens and better screens at home, sports bars across the country remain full.
There is money to be made in a deal that creates a premium communal viewing experience. Theater chains like the Alamo Drafthouse have already proven that leaning into hospitality changes the way people think about movie theaters. Why couldn’t a deal with the NFL or ESPN do that again?
It would be a win for an industry that needs to create new revenue streams. It would be a win for an industry that needs inventory that people want to see in a time when most movies are instantly dismissed with “it’ll be on Netflix in a month.”
Sports coming to movie theaters makes too much sense not to happen, and it should be big business when it finally does.
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Demetri Ravanos is a former columnist and editor for Barrett Media. He is the creator of The Sports Podcast Festival, and a previous host of the Chewing Clock and Media Noise podcasts. He occasionally fills in on stations across the Carolinas in addition to hosting Panthers and College Football podcasts. His radio resume includes stops at WAVH and WZEW in Mobile, AL, WBPT in Birmingham, AL and WBBB, WPTK and WDNC in Raleigh, NC.
You can find him on Twitter @DemetriRavanos or reach him by email at DemetriTheGreek@gmail.com.
