The NFL Has a Rom-Com Strategy

The NFL has about 250 million fans, almost half of them women, yet most football entertainment has historically been made with a male viewer in mind. That helps explain one of the most curious audience-development experiments in sports, which is now three movies deep.

Hallmark’s Holiday Touchdown: A Bears Love Story, the third installment in the network’s ongoing partnership with the NFL and Skydance Sports, will kick off Hallmark’s holiday lineup on Oct. 17. The Kansas City-set first film, Holiday Touchdown: A Chiefs Love Story, in which a superfan falls in love with someone from the team’s front office, was the most-watched cable movie of 2024 with 3.7 million total viewers. Last year’s sequel with the Buffalo Bills was also one of the network’s highest-rated movies, with 2.3 million. (The Chiefs had a head start, thanks to back-to-back Super Bowl wins and the cultural supernova of Travis Kelce’s romance with Taylor Swift.)

“These are two legacy Americana brands,” says Darren Abbott, president of Hallmark Media. “We’ve literally taken what makes a great Hallmark movie, in this case a Christmas movie, and put it in the context of one of America’s favorite pastimes.”

While the pairing might initially seem odd, the architects of the franchise explain that gathering to watch games and gathering to watch Hallmark holiday movies create a similar sense of community and tradition. This year’s entry is set in Chicago and stars Lyndsy Fonseca (How I Met Your Mother) and Robert Buckley (One Tree Hill), as well as Marsha Mason and Khary Payton (The Walking Dead), with cameos from Bears head coach Ben Johnson, current players and alumni, and team mascot Staley Da Bear.

Fonseca plays a journalist writing an article about a woman attending her 500th Bears game. The superfan, played by Mason, agrees to participate in the profile only if her firefighter grandson can show the reporter around Chicago during the holidays. Presumably, that leads to love — because if there’s one thing we know about these movies, it’s that they always have a happy ending.

“It’s the least cynical series of projects that I’ve ever worked on,” says Skydance Sports head Jason Reed. “We’re able to take these two experiences that are similar on a human level, and bring them together to make these movies, and it’s additive. One plus one is three is cliché, but it really works with these movies.”

The commercial logic is less sentimental. “There are 250 million self-reported fans of the NFL in the United States, which basically means almost everybody,” says Reed, and much of the content made for them skews masculine. “We thought that there was an opportunity to both provide content that would service that audience but also bring fans who don’t yet know they’re fans into the tent.”

The partnership is neither a traditional brand-placement deal nor a run-of-the-mill co-production. Hallmark declined to discuss the exact structure of the agreement, but Abbott says it’s part of a new initiative called “One Hallmark” that aims to integrate divisions responsible for entertainment and retail, as well as a new one that runs cruises, pop-ups and touring live shows. In addition to the movies, Hallmark makes and sells licensed NFL product through its 1,100 specialty stores and mass retailers.