During upfront presentations on Wednesday, Netflix announced several sports projects, including some previously unannounced documentaries.
The company officially announced its behemoth 1990s Dallas Cowboys docuseries, which it reportedly acquired for $50 million last summer. News of the series, created in partnership between NFL Films and Skydance Sports, broke a year ago.
Netflix also announced its docuseries Sprint, which we wrote about last August, will go live before the Summer Olympics in July. Sprint comes from Box to Box Films, the production company behind Drive to Survive and other series, and features Sha’Carri Richardson, Noah Lyles, and Shericka Jackson, among others.
A new Simone Biles multi-part series, Simone Biles: Rising, premieres in July. The four-part docuseries comes from Gotham Chopra’s Religion of Sports and “offers an intimate look at the story behind” Biles’ withdrawal from the Summer Olympics in 2021.
Another new Netflix docuseries focuses on Olympic men’s basketball. Premiering in early 2025, the unnamed series is produced by Connor Schell’s Words & Pictures, Higher Ground Productions, and Barack and Michelle Obama. The series “goes behind the scenes on the journey to the top of the Olympic podium, revealing what it takes to suit up and ball at the international level. ”
Sprint, Simone Biles: Rising and the untitled basketball series are also produced in partnership with the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
Overall, that’s a decent hunk of unscripted sports content coming to Netflix in the near future, along with its previously announced slate of scripted fare.
[Netflix]
