See what the company co-founder and executive producer behind Formula 1: Drive to Survive has to say about the importance of great storytelling and how the approach is shaping the world of sports entertainment.
While Paul Martin disagrees with this line of thinking, the company he co-founded has very much changed the way we consume sports and the ways in which sports leagues operate.
When Box To Box Films produced Formula 1: Drive to Survive for Formula 1 and Netflix in 2019, the average race drew just 672,000 viewers in the U.S., and the future of F1’s presence in America was very much at risk earlier in the decade. But Drive To Survive became a phenomenon, captivating the country’s audience during the pandemic and giving the sport a sorely-needed shot in the arm, unlike we’ve ever seen from a sports docuseries. There are now three U.S. F1 races per year in Austin, Miami, and Las Vegas, and races on ESPN now average 1.4 million viewers, more than double from just six years ago.
“Drive To Survive was in some ways complete lightning in a bottle,” Martin told Boardroom over breakfast last month in Midtown Manhattan. “It was a sport that was at a particular moment in its trajectory. It is kind of nuts now to think about it. We were able to present it in a way that just captured people’s imaginations and made the sport seem interesting and seem kind of cool, where maybe the live races didn’t for whatever reason.”
Wanting to keep its new generation of younger fans that Drive To Survive brought in engaged, F1 has mixed in shorter sprint races to the schedule and has limited team and driver practice times. Major League Baseball has recently changed rules to shorten games, as have sports like cricket. Martin’s Box To Box found itself in the enviable position every business wanted to be in, seen as the company that could unlock the x of y.
Everyone wanted Drive to Survive for their league. It produced Full Swing for the PGA Tour, Break Point for the tennis tours, Onside for Major League Soccer, FACEOFF: Inside the NHL for hockey, Unchained for the Tour de France, and recently Any Given Saturday for the SEC and Matchroom: The Greatest Showmen for boxing.
“When people talk about trying to replicate [Drive To Survive] we’re always very honest with them,” Martin said. “Changing your audience or growing your sport is probably not at the top of my agenda. What we try to do is we will make the best, most authentic version of your world. All I can control is the storytelling and we think we’re pretty good at it.”
The Matchroom series, Martin said, became driven by the father-son relationship between legendary boxing promoters Eddie and Barry Hearn as the show captured amazing moments in the ring like Daniel Dubois upsetting Anthony Joshua, and the Conor Benn-Chris Eubank fight. And while he thinks boxing is still a massive draw for fans of all ages, citing the massive audiences Netflix got for the Mike Tyson-Jake Paul and Canelo Alvarez-Terence Crawford fights, the sport definitely has a storytelling problem.
Floyd Mayweather, Martin continued, built the idea that an unbeaten record was the definition of an all-time great boxer’s legacy. So now, the best boxers no longer fight each other, unlike the previous era Box To Box depicted in a previous Showtime series called The Kings, which detailed the legendary bout fought by legends like Roberto Duran, Sugar Ray Leonard, Marvin Hagler, and Tommy Hearns.
“Duran has lost two or three fights in a row, and everyone thinks he’s washed up,” Martin said. “And he comes back and fights as this massive underdog and he wins. And that’s where the real legacy of the storytelling is built. If boxing can get back to where the best fight the best and you accept that fighters are going to have losses on their record, it’s those comebacks that really make legends.”
To make a great sports docuseries, Martin said you need three key ingredients. You need a good story, characters that exist beyond the sports you’re showing, and a good amount of luck. If you focus purely on wins and losses, he said, you’re making a highlight reel. So you need characters that resonate with really good stories beyond just the sports they play.
“You’re always like, ‘alright, what does this character want?'” Martin said. “And inevitably people are like, ‘well, they really want to win.’ No, shit. Everybody in sport wants to win. If that’s all you’ve got, then that’s not going to work. It’s really digging in to find out why these people are really on their journey. And that can come in unexpected places.”
The best characters in Martin’s Box To Box shows haven’t always been the ones who win, but who have the most at stake. That’s unique personalities like former Haas principal Günther Steiner or driver Daniel Ricciardo in Drive To Survive, Joel Dahmen in Full Swing or Nick Kyrgios in Break Point. The breakout character from the first season of Any Given Saturday, the Vanderbilt football team, provided every element of character, story, and luck.
A lot of people, Paul said, wondered why perennial SEC doormat Vanderbilt was even included in the show’s first season, which premiered in August. Coming from the UK and having attended London’s Kingston University, Martin hadn’t appreciated how big college football was in the South. But he quickly saw the scale, the noise, the pageantry, the passion, and how much every game and every player means to the students, alumni, and local community.
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All that came to a head as the Netflix cameras were on hand in Nashville on Oct. 5, 2024, when Vanderbilt were 23.5-point underdogs against mighty, No. 1 ranked Alabama, which did not let Box To Box follow them for season one. Martin and company were at the right place at the right time as the Commodores pulled off the upset of the season, sending shockwaves through the country and the college football world as the show featured head coach and former Vandy player Clark Lea and captivating transfer quarterback Diego Pavia.
“I’d love to say we saw it coming,” Martin said, “but we didn’t. Luck is sometimes the most important ingredient.”
Unlike F1 or MLB, football hasn’t changed its rules to have to cater to a younger audience. It’s almost becoming a self-perpetuating myth, Martin believes, that young people don’t have the attention span to watch sports. All sports have their own issues, and sometimes leagues can’t get out of their own way because they’ve done things one way for so long and their audience and market is changing. For so long, Formula 1 couldn’t get out of its own way, and its partnership with Netflix and Box To Box changed all that. Other sports followed as they looked to Martin to help shape the way their leagues’ stories were told.
And whether it’s short form, scripted or live, Martin said Box To Box will continue to retell stories inside and outside sports with great characters.
“I don’t think we’re going to radically change what we do and how we work,” Martin said, “because we generally believe as a company that if you tell great stories in whatever format, audiences will come and engage.”
That simple mantra over the last several years has helped Martin and Box To Box take the sports world by storm.
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