If you believe the old adage that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, then the UFC promo stuffed crudely into the middle of the Golden Globes was very successful. Otherwise, the consensus is that the moment was pretty cringe.
The 83rd Annual Golden Globes awards aired on Sunday night on Paramount CBS, the new home of the UFC for the next seven years. So a little corporate synergy was put into play that saw UFC star Mackenzie Dern and Brian Ortega walk out on stage to play the role of ‘bodyguards’
for Heated Rivalry presenters Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams.
We are not haters. There are ways the show producers could have made this idea work. But the way it played out surpassed awkward into the bizarre and nonsensical. Awards show watchers online flooded X (formerly Twitter) to scratch their heads and mock the moment.
During a post-Globes breakdown with industry website Deadline, event producers Ricky Kirshner and Glenn Weiss were asked, “Was it your choice how it played out?” Which is obviously what one asks when a bit goes over well.
“I’ll say this: we were creating this party atmosphere,” Weiss replied. “We were trying to not just present everything as traditional award shows would present them, maybe taking a few attention-grabbing moments and all, and UFC is obviously entering a new thing with CBS and Paramount+, so they’re all partners. So we basically decided to take two elements that are kind of hot right now, the Heated Rivalry, it’s insane what kind of attention it’s getting right now, to juxtapose it with that and create this moment together, we thought it was a fun little moment.”
Deadline’s Nellie Andreeva pushed back on that, asking more directly, “You liked it the way it played out?”
“I think we’re getting more questions about it than anything else,” Weiss said with a laugh. “So it got attention, right?”
Asked if the Heated Rivalry stars participated in the crafting of that moment, the producers said yes.
“A lot of times you write stuff for presenters and they are like, yeah, no, maybe, they add to it,” Kirshner said. “So we worked with them a little bit on a couple of different ideas, and the one they signed off on was that. And then when they showed up for the rehearsal, they really committed to the bet. So it actually worked great.”
In case you were wondering whether Weiss and Kirshner would admit to any errors in how they ran the Golden Globes, the most hated element of the show was the integration of Polymarket betting into the event. Before every category, Polymarket odds on who would win popped on the screen. So in case you were wondering, yes, betting is ruining awards shows too now.
Credit to Deadline for straight up just saying the Polymarket thing sucked. But once again, Kirshner and Weiss suggested it was actually great.
“Did it really interrupt the show?” Kirshner asked. “Sorry, I have to disagree with that. There are many times where you’re showing tweets from home. ‘Hey, who’s going to win? Who’s going to this?’ It was a bumper going into the next commercial which set up the next award. Was there an element of it that was Polymarket? Sure, but I don’t think it interrupted the show.”
We’ll see how much it interrupts the UFC’s shows when Polymarket makes its broadcast debut at UFC 324 on January 24th.
