NFL, Skydance Sports deepen partnership with creation of content studio

Christian Bale (left) as Al Davis and Nicolas Cage as John Madden in the movie 'Madden.' (Courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios).

As the NFL and Paramount Skydance actively hammer out a new media rights agreement, it seems the league is happy to deepen its partnership with one part of the company.

The NFL and Skydance Sports, the film studio which is now part of the greater Paramount ecosystem after David Ellison’s Skydance purchased Paramount last summer, will broaden its partnership with the formation of a “premier content studio” focused on scripted, football-adjacent films, according to Sam Farmer in the Los Angeles Times.

News of the partnership is particularly notable as the NFL and Paramount actively negotiate a new broadcast deal thanks to the change-of-control clause triggered by Skydance’s purchase of Paramount last summer. The Paramount deal is the first of several new rights deals the NFL hopes to complete prior to next season. While it would be unwise to read very much into this partnership as a sign that those negotiations are making forward progress, it at least shows the two companies remain committed to working together in some capacity.

In 2022, the NFL purchased a stake in Skydance Media, which now makes the league a de minimis investor in the combined Paramount Skydance.

Three films, all of which are well into production, were highlighted in the report about the expanded partnership: the John Madden biopic Madden, a dramatized telling of former New York Giants running back John Tuggle’s “Mr. Irrelevant” story, and The Land, a fictionalized Hulu series about the Cleveland Browns.