2012 HBO boxing budget 35Mil, Showtime 28Mil

Glad to see the money I send them is going to boxing. Now it's time to see how they leverage their financial positions. A couple of mega-fights and a bunch of crap? Consistently good bouts without much cross over appeal?

Hopefully Sho continues to build on last year's momentum and HBO sees a threat and tries to outdo them. Here's to hoping 2012 provides as many thrills as 2011!

 

It's still surprisingly low for me. I never knew the numbers until now but their budgets are those of an mediocre or weak football team from Champions League. All the top teams from Top championship like Porto/Portugal , Zenit/Russia , Lyon/France, Marseille/France etc have over 100mil budget. And we aren't talking about football giants Like Barcelona, Real, Manchester U, Chelsea, Inter, etc.

 

Philla, you have HBO and Showtime in Canada?

 

Financially, the world was in a much better position 5 years ago. I think it's natural to expect a decline from then, especially in the entertainment business. Whilst it's not good to hear, I think it's more of a reflection on the state of the economy than the state of boxing.

 

That's what I feared.. Wish they'd give the figures for last year or the year before though, would be a little easier to try and gauge how many/quality of fights.

 

Showtime has scaled back their investment in MMA, so this is probably where the extra $ is from.

As long as both enforce strong matchmaking then parity is great news.

 

Agreed. However, as a long time HBO subscriber I see them trending more towards self-generated programming like Boardwalk Empire and epic mini-series. Those take up a huge amount of money and appeal to a broader audience.

It's probably a little bit of both factors.

 

HBO scaling back is good news imo. They were overpaying like crazy and still are. That $35 million budget has been there for a few years now.

 

I just hope they don't continue to overpay and we get less because of cutbacks.

 

Please, no more Tarver, Lacy, Berto or Dawson making millions fighting bums with 200 people in the crowd.

 

:deal

 

The UFC pays a fraction of these budgets and they sell well on PPV.

Bottom line is that 99% of the fighters don't deserve millions.

They should implement a system with big bonuses while at the same time cutting fight by fight purses significantly.

Fight 3x times against top opponents in 12 months = extra 300k
Fight 4x times against top opponents in 12 months = extra 500k

 

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