Religion of Sports carved out a niche with its sports legend docuseries. Now, it's expanding.
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INC. 5000Meet the Tom Brady-Backed Production Company Forging Its Own Path Amid the Streamer Wars
Religion of Sports carved out a niche with its sports legend docuseries. Now, it's expanding.
When it comes to understanding athletes, Gotham Chopra has learned some lessons: Losses are more interesting than victories, the old guard has more enlightening things to say than up-and-coming phenoms, and success doesn't typically happen overnight. It was Serena Williams who served that last point to him after he rallied for seven years to try to get her to do a documentary with his production company, Religion of Sports. " 'Boy, you're persistent,' " he remembers she said to him.
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Chopra was telling me this story in early July, when that work had finally paid off. In the Arena: Serena Williams, which he directed, was set to debut on ESPN the next night and become the latest docuseries out of Religion of Sports, which Chopra founded with former NFLers Tom Brady and Michael Strahan in 2017.
Their timing was good. In the late 2010s, Hollywood was spending lavishly to fill up the libraries of new streaming services, and unscripted content was cheaper to produce and often caught on with audiences, especially if a recognizable face was attached. Athletes fit the bill. Since its launch, Religion of Sports has produced shows with a range of GOATs, from Brady to Serena to Simone Biles, whose return to the Olympics this summer the company has documented for a four-part series on Netflix.
Now, Religion of Sports is trying to figure out where it fits into a sports and entertainment landscape that has seen layoffs, losses, and upheaval everywhere from ESPN to Warner Bros. The company has grown from launching a single film to generating $33 million in revenue last year and will have to grow even more to match the ambitions Chopra has for it. "I think of Pixar or Marvel or A24," Chopra says. "I want a brand that means something."
For all those grandiose plans, the Hollywood magic happens, as it often does, inside an L.A. office park squished between a satellite array and a freeway. The Religion of Sports office walls are covered in signed jerseys and life-size cutouts of Brady and Strahan. Most of the 40-plus employees are sports nuts, but not all. The company is working with two of the most famous American athletes of this century, but its postproduction coordinator has cheat sheets at her desk to remind her not only which teams they played for, but also which sports they played. The mix of fanatics and people who just like telling stories makes the ideal roster. "We nerdy storytellers get in a room and say, 'How can we make this bigger than Serena? Bigger than Tom?' " says Chopra.
Another lesson from successful athletes: The work never stops. In July, Chopra met with company CEO Ameeth Sankaran and some other staffers to sort through a thicket of problems that had emerged on various projects. In one, the relative of an athlete was demanding to be paid more for family photos that might appear in the film, while a B-list celebrity who was on tour had agreed to be interviewed for another project but could do so only on one of two dates in two different cities.
The obstacles that emerge in film and TV production mean the company practices discipline when deciding which projects to pursue. "We do have a matrix," Sankaran says. "What's the revenue potential? What's the award potential? What's the repeatability?" Consistency is a marker of success in sports--Chopra's docuseries with Brady had 10 episodes, one for each of his Super Bowl wins--and the ability to turn one-off films into a repeatable franchise is key to Hollywood success: The
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