On a recent brisk night, a group of Brooklyn Nets players and staff members walked seven blocks from their hotel in downtown Sacramento to a multiplex on the second floor of a sleepy shopping mall.
Setting aside their Icees and popcorn, Brook Lopez and Markel Brown played around with a Time Crisis 4 arcade machine. Rondae Hollis-Jefferson entered the theater and slouched into an aisle seat, so he could stretch out his legs. Willie Reed stuffed snacks from the concession stand into each of his pockets: Sour Punch Straws, Starbursts, hot dogs, nachos and a few bottles of water. He had a bag of chips tucked inside the hood of his sweatshirt.
“I just ran out of space,” Reed said.
Away from the packed arenas and television cameras, the professional lives of NBA players in an 82-game season can border on mundane — especially in less glamorous stops like Milwaukee, Salt Lake City and Indianapolis.
It is an oddly specific plight that the marketing departments of major film studios have begun to recognize. Increasingly, professional sports teams are receiving invitations for free private screenings of movies before their public release. The only cost for the teams and players is an expectation that, if they like the film, they might let their fans know about it.
Such movie nights do not happen when teams pass through Miami, Los Angeles and New York, where players need no help finding entertainment off the court.
But most league cities are not South Beach, and these movie nights benefit all parties involved: Team officials cherish any opportunity to foster camaraderie among players in a controlled environment; the players welcome any assistance in combating the doldrums of the road; and the studios capitalize on a cost-efficient way to put films in front of influential viewers.
“Athletes are incredibly influential in social media, particularly with young males, and that’s an audience that is increasingly hard to reach through traditional advertising,” said Ben Carlson, a social media research consultant focused on the media and entertainment industry. “As studios try to figure out how to get the right people talking about a movie, getting sports stars early access is a great mechanism to reach people online.”
And it does not cost studios all that much. Studios typically rent out a theater near the team’s hotel and pick up the tab for whatever concession food the players want — expenses that typically range from a few hundred dollars to a couple thousand. Traveling NBA teams, baseball clubs at spring training and football teams in training camp are particularly attractive targets for the studio marketers.
In Sacramento, the Nets saw an early screening of “The Night Before,” a holiday-season comedy starring Seth Rogen that opened Friday. Earlier in the season, in San Antonio, a considerably larger group of Nets players, coaches, officials and broadcasters attended a screening of “Spectre,” the new James Bond film. The New York Knicks saw “Spectre” this season, too, in Milwaukee. Carmelo Anthony posted about the film on Twitter to his 7 million followers and told Knicks beat reporters the next morning that he preferred his martinis stirred.
In the past two seasons, the Nets have also had team outings to “Top Five,” “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “Captain Phillips.”
The Nets’ screenings are organized by Matt Riccardi, the team’s senior manager for basketball operations, who receives invitations from Jeff Pomeroy, a public relations consultant focused on sports who counts several major studios as clients. Riccardi then conducts an informal poll of the players, sometimes sending them a link to a trailer, to gauge interest.
The movies might feel like a rainy day activity at summer camp, but to Riccardi, who is in charge of the team’s player development program, they fit into his larger effort to provide players with positive experiences away from the court. In Memphis, Riccardi accompanied two players to the National Civil Rights Museum. In Atlanta, the team met with former sprinter Tommie Smith, a gold medalist at the 1968 Olympics, famous for his black power salute on the podium.
Riccardi said he was considering a bowling night this week in Boston.
“It’s a team bonding experience more than anything,” Riccardi said of the films, careful not to inflate their importance. “It’s kind of like, ‘Let’s go to the movies, laugh, forget about the pressure of the NBA season and be entertained for a little while.’”
Lopez, the longest tenured Nets player and a film buff, agreed. He said he was not particularly interested in seeing “The Night Before” — his favorite movie is “Return of the Jedi,” and he likes animated films — but he thought it would be a chance to get to know some of his new teammates. Brown, Hollis-Jefferson, Reed and Donald Sloan, who also attended the screening, are all in their first or second season with the team.
“I’ll go see a Seth Rogen movie with them, but I don’t know if they’d go see a Disney movie with me,” Lopez said, feigning umbrage.
Lopez, who signed a $60 million deal with the Nets this summer, extolled the joys of free popcorn and soda. In Sacramento, though, he was disappointed not to find Dots or Swedish Fish at the candy counter.
“I got Milk Duds,” Lopez said. “Those are work. But they’re good, too, I guess.”
Though there are no formal contracts or explicit obligations, the Nets, like other teams who attend these screenings, have an understanding that they should acknowledge the event on their social media accounts. Players, too, are generally asked to follow a simple rule: If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything.
In Sacramento, Reed ran over to some people wearing masks resembling characters from the film to snap a selfie for his Twitter page.
“Word of mouth is no longer the water cooler on Monday morning,” said Dennis Rice, a marketing and distribution consultant who has had senior positions at Disney and Miramax. “Word of mouth now is tweeting, ‘Don’t go to the 10 o’clock show because I just got out of the 7 o’clock, and it stinks.’”
Movie marketers seem likely to keep chasing the favor of athletes, whose fans often overlap with a coveted demographic of young people who still frequently attend movies. Recognizing this, studios are increasingly trying to combine the right team, in the right city, with the right film.
“I don’t know if you want to show them ‘The English Patient,’ ” Rice said.
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