UFC Rio Bombs at the Box Office

By all accounts UFC Rio: Silva vs Okami (aka UFC 134) was a smashing success: the event sold out immediately and the crowd at the HSBC Arena in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil were called by many as the best UFC crowd ever; the fighters on the card put on a great show, with plenty of exciting knock outs; and, most importantly to the people in the stands, the Brazliians on the card were overwhelmingly successful – 10 out of 11 matches involving a Brazilian saw a Brazilian come out on top. 

But unfortunately we have to rain on the UFC’s parade – surprisingly the event bombed at the box office.  The early estimates are in for UFC Rio’s pay-per-view buyrate and they aren’t good – the event sold in the 250,000-300,000 range.  Considering we predicted the event to do in the 500,000 buyrate range (and we weren’t alone in that prediction), the actual results have to be considered disastrous.

So what went wrong?  First off you can blame Mother Nature, as Huricane Irene created havoc in the East Coast of the U.S., cutting power to millions of homes (hence, not allowing them to watch the PPV).  And Anderson Silva hasn’t been known to be a great pay-per-view seller in the past.  But, despite all this, this event should have sold much more – it had a title belt on the line and was packed with big name stars (Silva, Forrest Griffin, Shogun Rua, Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira).  Perhaps most disturbing is that a poor-selling PPV has become the norm, not the exception, for the UFC this year.  Already in 2011 there have been seven UFC events that have failed to crack the 400,000 sales threshold; 2010 only had four for the whole year.

At this point it looks next to impossible for the UFC to continue its trend of year-over-year growth at the PPV box office.  In 2010 the UFC had three events sell over 1,000,000 PPVs – this year looks like they’ll have none, unless Brock Lesnar does happen to make a comeback later in the year.  While the Fox TV deal is exciting news for the company and infuses a nice chunk of change into their coffers, this is still a business built around selling pay-per-views.  Will Zuffa’s gamble of giving away its signature event (a heavyweight championship match) on free TV in the fall help sell future PPVs?  Or will it spoil new fans into not wanting to pay for something that they got previously for free on Fox?  Or has mixed martial arts finally reached its apex as a sport?  After all, continuous growth for all eternity doesn’t happen, regardless of the business in question.  Only time will tell.