Dana White reveals his surprising main goal for the extraordinary Noche UFC event is to compete for entertainment's grandest awards
11/09/2024 10:23
UFC 306 this coming Saturday is one of the most highly anticipated combat sports events of all time with it being the first one to take place at the Sphere in Las Vegas.
The UFC has put together an incredible team of external producers for the event in the hopes that they can make the event live up to expectations and make it a spectacle.
UFC CEO, Dana White, recently revealed that the event has surpassed $20m in cost, making it the most expensive combat sports event of all time.
Dana White hopeful that UFC 306 will be nominated for a Grammy, Emmy, and Oscar
With the event taking place on Mexican Independence Day weekend, Noche UFC (UFC 306) will be a ‘love letter to Mexico’ according to White, and throughout the evening, there will be mini films with the fights acting as chapters.
For the event, the UFC hired several external producers to try and make sure it runs as well as possible. The collaborators that they hired boast 29 Emmy wins, 80 Emmy nominations, 2 Oscar nominations, 1 Golden Globes win, 5 Golden Globes nominations, 1 Grammy win, and 2 Grammy nominations.
With that, Dana White is hoping that the event and production could potentially end up winning a big television award.
“You know me, I love to break records, this is going to be the biggest gate we’ve ever done in the history of the company, and the most pre-buys on PPV ever too. People have been buying the event the week before the week before the event,” White commented in the Dana White’s Contender Series post-fight press conference this past Wednesday.
“So my goal with this thing is to be nominated for an Oscar, an Emmy, and a Grammy, so yes, it will be a documentary,” White revealed.
Dana White admits what the biggest challenge they had to overcome was
The Sphere is a completely unique venue meaning there will likely have been obstacles the promotion had to overcome to make it run as smoothly as possible.
White has admitted that the biggest issue the production ran into was the lighting inside the Sphere.
“Lighting. Yeah, there’s no lighting rig. This will be the first event ever in the history of the company, probably in the history of combat sports I would imagine, where there isn’t a lighting rig hanging over the Octagon.
“So you have lights, cameras, microphones, different audio all up in that trust thing up there and that’s all gone so that was the big first challenge,” White admitted.
The UFC boss told the media that the show will progressively get better as it goes on with the prelims likely to just be fights as normal, with the mini films being introduced throughout the main card.
White also said that each fight will live inside ‘worlds’ and throughout the fight, the world will subtly evolve.
“We call them worlds, and the fight will live inside this world and the world will evolve as the fights are going on but it’ll be very subtle, clouds will move, fires will burn, birds will fly, whatever the hell is going on in that world at that time and it’ll slowly evolve during the fight,” he continued.
