Fanatics Studios: When Your Jersey Seller Decides It’s Also Hollywood

By Tony Hicks


There was a time when knowing who sold your team’s jersey was enough. You bought the hat, maybe complained about the price, and moved on with your life. That time is officially dead.

Now the company that sells you licensed merch, runs live shopping streams, handles sports betting, moves collectibles, hosts fan events, and quietly tracks your spending habits across all of it has decided something crucial was missing: control of the stories themselves.

Enter Fanatics Studios, the newly announced media and entertainment arm of the sports commerce behemoth, launched in partnership with OBB Media. According to the press release—and the carefully curated optimism surrounding it—this joint venture will create films, documentaries, live events, scripted and unscripted series, and “content at the intersection of sports and culture.”

Which is corporate shorthand for: we want to own the entire emotional relationship fans have with sports, from purchase to perception.

This isn’t just a media expansion. It’s a philosophical one. Fanatics isn’t dipping a toe into Hollywood. It’s building a permanent residence right next to the algorithms.

The Fan Experience™, Now With a Screenwriter

If you read the announcement closely, a theme emerges: fan closeness. Fans closer to teams. Fans closer to players. Fans closer to moments. Fans closer to brands that already have a credit card on file.

Fanatics Studios plans to produce everything from prestige documentaries to digital series, while distributing content globally. And it’s not doing this in isolation. Projects are already lined up with ESPN, WWE, Major League Baseball, and the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.

There’s also a multipart documentary on Tom Brady, because no modern sports media initiative is complete without revisiting a man whose career has already been documented more thoroughly than most countries’ histories.

And just to underline how global and future-facing this all is, there’s a flag football tournament planned in Saudi Arabia—because nothing says “fan-first storytelling” like geopolitics with shoulder pads.

From Merch Table to Message Control

Fanatics CEO Michael Rubin framed the move as a natural extension of the company’s mission: enhancing the fan experience while supporting all existing business lines.

That last part is doing heavy lifting.

Because when a company with $13 billion in projected 2026 revenue and a valuation north of $30 billion decides to create a media studio expected to generate nine-figure revenue in its first year, it’s not because storytelling was missing from the world. It’s because owning the narrative reduces friction everywhere else.

Merchandising margins improve when fans feel emotionally invested.
Betting engagement increases when stories elevate stakes.
Collectibles gain perceived value when moments are mythologized.
Live events sell out faster when content primes demand.

This isn’t Hollywood as art. This is Hollywood as infrastructure.

Michael Ratner and the Professionalization of Hype

Running Fanatics Studios will be Michael Ratner, founder and CEO of OBB Media. Ratner’s background is rooted in pop-culture production, athlete branding, and highly polished access-driven storytelling.

That choice matters.

This isn’t investigative sports journalism. This isn’t messy, complicated storytelling about labor disputes, brain injuries, or uncomfortable power dynamics. This is controlled access with cinematic lighting, where proximity replaces perspective and narrative friction is carefully edited out.

The goal isn’t to challenge fans. It’s to immerse them just enough to deepen loyalty.

The ESPN Effect, Rebuilt for Commerce

For decades, ESPN served as the gravitational center of sports storytelling. Even as it struggled with cord-cutting and changing media economics, it retained cultural authority: if ESPN covered it, it mattered.

Fanatics Studios doesn’t want to replace ESPN. It wants something more efficient: integration without distance.

When the same ecosystem that sells the jersey also produces the documentary about the player wearing it, the line between coverage and conversion collapses. The story doesn’t end with the credits. It ends with a “Shop Now” button.

And that’s not a bug. That’s the point.

WWE, MLB, and the Comfort of Sanitized Mythology

Partnering with WWE makes perfect sense. Wrestling perfected brand-safe spectacle decades ago. Storylines are dramatic, conflicts are contained, and outcomes ultimately serve the company’s long-term goals.

Major League Baseball offers something else: legacy. History. Statistics. Nostalgia. A sense that sports used to be simpler—even if they never actually were.

Fanatics Studios can mine both ends of that spectrum: scripted spectacle and archival reverence, all while controlling tone, emphasis, and distribution.

This is sports storytelling without unpredictability. A highlight reel of inevitability.

The Olympics: Peak Brand Halo

Serving as a content partner for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics is arguably the crown jewel of the early slate. The Olympics offer global reach, emotional storytelling, and built-in legitimacy.

They also come with controversy, displacement, labor issues, and massive public cost overruns—topics that rarely make it into the official narrative packages.

Fanatics Studios won’t need to suppress criticism. It will simply out-produce it.

Because when you flood the zone with polished stories of perseverance, unity, and triumph, dissent struggles to find oxygen.

Nine Figures, One Year: The Confidence of Scale

Fanatics estimates that its new studio will generate nine-figure revenue in its first year. That number isn’t just ambitious—it’s revealing.

This isn’t a startup experimenting with content. This is a mature enterprise applying existing data, existing relationships, and existing distribution channels to media.

Fanatics already knows:

  • What fans buy

  • When they buy

  • Which players convert best

  • Which narratives drive engagement

  • Which demographics respond to which formats

Fanatics Studios isn’t guessing what stories will work. It’s reverse-engineering them from purchasing behavior.

Content as Conversion, Stories as Infrastructure

The most important thing to understand about Fanatics Studios is that it isn’t competing with Netflix, HBO, or traditional studios on creative grounds.

It’s competing on leverage.

Traditional studios need hits.
Fanatics needs reinforcement.

If a documentary modestly increases merchandise conversion rates, it’s a win.
If a digital series nudges betting engagement upward, it’s a win.
If a live event drives collectibles demand, it’s a win.

Success doesn’t require cultural dominance. It requires incremental behavioral shifts at scale.

The Death of Neutral Sports Storytelling

This is the part that should make fans uneasy, even if they’re excited.

When the same company controls:

  • Licensing

  • Distribution

  • Merchandising

  • Events

  • Betting

  • Collectibles

  • And now storytelling

Neutrality becomes inefficient.

There’s no incentive to explore uncomfortable truths when optimism converts better. There’s no upside in ambiguity when clarity sells more hoodies.

Fanatics Studios won’t lie. It won’t need to. It will simply choose which truths are worth telling.

The Long Game: Owning Memory

Sports fandom isn’t just about watching games. It’s about memory. Where you were. Who you watched with. What it meant.

Media shapes memory.

By controlling how moments are framed, revisited, and celebrated, Fanatics positions itself not just as a retailer—but as a custodian of meaning.

Years from now, fans may remember events not as they experienced them live, but as they were re-presented: through documentaries, recap series, and branded retrospectives.

That’s power no merchandise company ever had before.

The Future Is Seamless—and Slightly Unsettling

Fanatics Studios represents the logical endpoint of modern sports capitalism: a closed loop where emotion, commerce, and content reinforce each other continuously.

Fans will love parts of it.
Athletes will benefit from parts of it.
Brands will thrive because of it.

But something gets thinner in the process: distance. Perspective. The space where stories can exist without being immediately monetized.

Fanatics didn’t just launch a studio.
It launched a worldview.

One where fandom is frictionless, stories are optimized, and loyalty is engineered—beautifully, efficiently, and relentlessly.

And the scariest part?

Most fans will barely notice the difference.

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