Michael Jordan has quite a few accolades to his name. He is in the NBA Hall of Fame., a 14 time All-Star, Rookie of the Year, 10 time scoring champ, 6 time NBA Champion, and now holds the record for the most watched ESPN documentary ever with the quarantine classic, The Last Dance.
Yahoo Sports reported that The Last Dance averaged 5.648 million viewers across all of the 10 episodes. The most popular episode was the first in the series which got 6.34 million people to tune in. Only the 8th episode recorded less than 5 million views per episode. The show was also picked up by Netflix who reported that almost 28 million people have streamed the documentary thus far.
Not only was The Last Dance the most viewed ESPN Documentary of all time, it was also the most watched TV program among men since COVID-19 canceled live sports in mid-March. Yahoo also reported that Chicago and North Carolina were the biggest viewing regions. This makes total sense, Jordan played most of his career in Chicago and is the majority owner of the NBA’s Charlotte Hornets.
With that many viewers comes a lot of advertising money. Michael Jordan is expected to earn between $3-4 million dollars for his overseeing of the production and licensing rights. It might surprise you to know that he has told NBC Sports that he plans to donate all of those proceeds to charity. Michael has an estimated net worth of over two billion dollars so donating a few million is just a drop in the bucket for him.
I also found it interesting that ESPN aired two different versions of the documentary. If you watched it on ESPN it had the profanity still in it, if you caught the ESPN 2 version it would be all edited out. Also speaking of editing, to create the ten, 50-minute episodes the producers and editors sorted through a whopping 10,000 hours of footage!
They also filmed hundreds of hours of interviews from a range of athletes and celebrities. Some notable people who make appearances in The Last Dance documentary are Phil Jackson, Scottie Pippen, Bob Costas, David Stern, Carmen Electra, Bill Clinton, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kobe Bryant, Justin Timberlake, and “ a former Chicago resident”, Barack Obama. Who knows why they addressed the former President of the United States that way but in doing so created a few online memes and jokes.
The Last Dance documentary was just another great success in the life of Michael Jordan. It helped get his name and brand recognition back to an all time high, gave sports fans something to watch in a time of no other sports going on, and created a lot of money that he will donate to charities.
If you missed it on ESPN and ESPN2 and live in the United States you will have to wait until July 19th, 2020 for it to come to USA Netflix.
After seeing the massive success of Michael Jordan’s The Last Dance documentary, ESPN is following up with another documentary on someone that is also perceived to be the greatest of all time in his sport, Tom Brady. The new documentary will be called Man In the Arena which will be released in 2021.
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