It was announced on Saturday that Golden Boy and Showtime will be taking its December 14th Adrien Broner-Marcos Maidana off of PPV and move it to the Showtime. The Broner-Maidana fight occurs one week before another Showtime event featuring Paulie Malignaggi and Zab Judah.
As the December 14th event will be taken off PPV, it will no longer take place in Las Vegas and moves to San Antonio, Texas. The move should help with the live gate. Even though Maidana is from Argentina, the undercard features Mexican American fighter Victor Ortiz returning to the ring against Mexican fighter Alfonso Gomez. The last big event in San Antonio received over 39,000 fans as Canelo Alvarez defeated Austin Trout.
Showtime’s Stephen Espinoza cited that the fight was happening during the holidays likely would not pull a sufficient amount of PPV buys.
Via Bad Left Hook:
“The real hesitation with the pay-per-view to the extent that we had hesitation was just the time of the year. We ran out of time on the calendar. Any other time of the year, this does 250-300,000 pay-per-views, easily,” said Showtime’s Stephen Espinoza.
Payout Perspective:
It’s the second time in recent days that a combat sports organization decides to pull a PPV to put it on network television. Here, there was no injury but the move to Showtime made sense. While its Showtime’s desire to push Broner as a PPV draw, he isn’t right now and it saw ahead of time that it was running its shows on top of one another. Moreover, with the fight during the Holiday season, casual fight fans would probably not want to shell out $65 for Broner-Maidana.
I wasn’t going to pay to watch Broner anyway, so this works for me.