The NFL's audience is roughly half women. Its content library is roughly 100% dude. The NFL saw an opening, and Hallmark filled it the only way it knows how: with Christmas movies.
The partnership between Hallmark, the NFL, and Skydance Sports is already three movies deep, and each one follows the same formula: pick a team, set a rom-com in its city, cast a few players as themselves. This year's is 'Holiday Touchdown: A Bears Love Story,' opening Countdown to Christmas on Oct. 17. Lyndsy Fonseca plays a journalist profiling a Bears superfan, Robert Buckley plays the superfan's firefighter grandson, and you can guess the rest. The numbers so far:
- 'A Chiefs Love Story' (2024) was the year's most-watched cable movie with 3.7M viewers. (It helped that this was peak Kelce-Swift mania, right after back-to-back Super Bowls.)
- 'A Bills Love Story' (2025) pulled 2.3M without a single pop star in the stands.
- Combined audience: 72% female.
What theyβre hoping for: football and Hallmark Christmas movies are both things people gather around every year. The movies are barely about the game, they're about a city and its fans, so Bears fans show up for Chicago and Hallmark fans leave caring about the Bears. Each side gets the other's audience.
Why it matters: leagues looking to grow their audience mostly stick to two plays: a live-rights deal or a docuseries (see: 'Drive to Survive' and everything it spawned). The NFL is trying scripted instead, cheaply and fast (about $2M and 16 days per movie), aimed at the half of its fans nobody bothered to program for. And the format scales. 29 teams to go.
