Fresh off his live boxing match with Jake Paul, Netflix is spotlighting Mike Tyson’s life in a new docuseries.
The project, which consists of three 60-minute episodes, will follow Tyson from his meteoric rise as the he “Baddest Man on the Planet” to his personal struggles – including a period of incarceration and widely publicized struggles related to his finances, substance abuse and in-ring controversies – and his eventual redemption.
“Having an opportunity to share my story through the reflective lens of my growth and maturity in a multi-part documentary on Netflix will be a challenging journey, yet a very welcoming one,” Tyson said in a statement. “Most people are too scared to look at their lives objectively, wanting to paint themselves as the hero of their own story. But if we are truly objective, we know we can never be the hero in our own story. We have to be able to face the man in the mirror, taking the good with the bad to give a full account of our contributions in this life. Netflix is the perfect platform to tell my story because of their global reach.”
The series is produced by EverWonder Studio, DLP Media Group, Five All In The Fifth. EverWonder’s Ian Oerfice, Scratchy Productions’ Jim Gray, DLP Media Group’s Michael Hughes and Greg C. Lake and Five All In The Fifth’s Douglas Banker and director Floyd Russ (“Untold: Malice at the Palace,” “American Manhunt: The Boston Marathon Bombing,” “Zion”) serve as executive producers.
The Tyson-Paul fight, which aired on Nov. 15, saw a record 108 million viewers worldwide tune in – becoming the most-streamed global sporting event ever, peaking at 65 million live concurrent streams, with 38 million concurrent streams in the U.S. alone.
Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos told a UBS-hosted investor conference last week that demand for the event was “off the charts” despite some of its subscribers facing technical difficulties during the stream.
“We hate to disappoint a member for one second. So yes, there was some of that,” Sarandos admitted. “But the real thing is, we had an enormous live audience: 108 million people watching live. You’d have to go back to the ’80s to get a live audience that big. It’s a Super Bowl-like audience that we were able to draw for this fight.”
“We were stressing the limits of the Internet itself that night,” he added. “We had a control room up in Silicon Valley that was re-engineering the entire Internet to keep it up during this fight because of the unprecedented demand that was happening.”
The Tyson docuseries joins Netflix’s lineup of sports-adjacent programming including “Enigma: Aaron Rodgers,” “Simone Biles Rising,” “Quarterback, Receiver,” “Starting 5,” “Sprint,” “Formula 1: Drive To Survive,” “Full Swing” and more. It also comes as the streamer is gearing up to air two live NFL games on Christmas Day, followed by WWE’s “Monday Night Raw” starting January 6.
