FMIA: Thursday Night Football flex, Roger Goodell’s contract and the latest from the NFL owners meetings

PHOENIX, Az. – This morning at the annual NFL Meetings at the Arizona Biltmore hotel, NFL owners and top club officials will hear from the future. The future is a man named David Ellison, the CEO of a film and media company called Skydance Media, which will partner with the league and media arm, NFL Films to create the kind of content the NFL believes is the future.

Imagine a motion picture in theaters, or streaming in your home, with John David Washington and Michael B. Jordan starring as NFL players Kenny Washington and Woody Strode, two of the four men who integrated pro football a year before Jackie Robinson broke the baseball color barrier. It’s the kind of story the NFL believes was never told with the Hollywood flair that the Robinson tale got.

NFL Films has been a vivid storyteller for decades. But the NFL has never been associated with the kind of scripted motion pictures, documentaries and star-driven projects that Skydance—one of the producers of “Top Gun: Maverick”—can do. This is the message Ellison will bring to the league today in a conversation with Ross Ketover of NFL Films. By the way, NFL Films is on board with the new venture, and will be part of the movie- and doc-making.

“We believed,” the NFL’s chief media and business officer Brian Rolapp said Sunday at the Biltmore, “that with how fans are watching the content they love, increasingly on all these streaming platforms, that football and sports was underrepresented relative to the demand that people want. So we said, ‘Let’s find somebody who sees the world the way we do and wants to create the world’s best sports content studio for scripted and unscripted content. Mainly focused on football, but also focused on any sports.”

Skydance debuts “Air,”