The octagon inside the Sphere: Bloody fights and soaring films

LAS VEGAS — After an animated vignette of conquistadors ransacking Indigenous Mexican temples played on the Sphere’s enormous video screen and the venue’s haptic seats shook violently, two mixed martial arts fighters approached each other on Mexican Independence Day weekend. As they battled in the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s caged octagon, birds soared across a backdrop of temple ruins.

The Sphere — a futuristic orb-like structure with more than 700,000 square feet of programmable screens inside and out — has primarily hosted musicians, keynote speakers and filmmakers since opening its radiant gaze upon the Las Vegas Strip in July 2023.

It was one of those concerts last year, part of U2’s nearly six-month residency, that amazed and inspired Dana White, the UFC’s chief executive. For months he has grandiosely proclaimed that he would hold the first live athletic competition at the Sphere, which can typically seat about 17,000 people.

The company invested $20 million into the spectacle that unfolded on Sept. 14, called Noche UFC, as White challenged his staff to mesh a brutal, polarizing blood sport with pageantry and flair by working with award-winning Hollywood creators.

“We showed everybody tonight what’s possible,” White said after the fight, which he said broke UFC records for ticket and merchandise sales. “You can do more than just concerts here and pull them off and make them great. So who’s next?”

The Sphere was built by James Dolan, the New York billionaire who oversees Madison Square Garden and the New York Knicks. Jennifer Koester, the president and chief operating officer of the Sphere, said that despite its reputation as an entertainment hall, the $2.3 billion space was not built with any parameters to prevent sports competitions. (The National Hockey League held its draft there in June.)

“It’s not a one-trick pony,” she said. “I think that the only requirement you have is you’ve got to utilize its full capacity.”

White said the Mexican Independence Day holiday was an effective vehicle to honor the country’s rich combat sports history through the Sphere’s technology. Mexico has become an increasingly important market for the UFC.

To fill the screen without distracting the fighters, Craig Borsari, the UFC’s chief content officer, assembled a team of Hollywood experts. The crew of more than 450 people featured Carlos López Estrada, an Oscar-nominated director for “Raya and the Last Dragon”; Germaine Franco, a Grammy-winning composer for “Encanto”; Baz Halpin, an executive producer for the film “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour”; and Glenn Weiss, a veteran Emmy-winning director of television awards shows.

“It was a really wild and exciting and totally unusual project, but we were hooked when Craig first suggested it,” said Halpin, the founder of Silent House Group, which in February produced Usher’s Super Bowl halftime show.

For the UFC event, Estrada led the development of “For Mexico, for All Time,” a film divided into six chapters that were played ahead of each of the night’s final fights. The chapters unraveled themes related to Mexican history before transitioning into wallpaper during fights.

Flower petals fell from the ceiling during animations about Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead holiday. Spectators chanted “¡Viva!” as a wall crumbled and a bell rang during a video about the Mexican War of Independence.

“We’re trying to keep the identity of the UFC and the look and feel of our product as intact as we can, but at the same time really lean into all these new opportunities,” Borsari said.

Valentina Shevchenko, one of the fighters, said the theatrics were noticeable but not overwhelming.

“I feel it’s big, I feel the energy of what is happening around, but I was so much focused on the fight,” she said. She defeated Alexa Grasso, one of the seven Mexican-born fighters on the card.

White said he hoped Noche UFC would push how other sports approached entertainment beyond halftime mascot performances and jugglers, citing the creation of the Intuit Dome in Inglewood, California, and other technologically advanced arenas.

Estrada said he thought the video format in the Sphere set a template.

“The fact that you’re taking brief departures from a sporting event to sit and enjoy movies, to me, is a game changer,” Estrada said.

Posters with early renderings of the artistic sequences hang in a hidden showroom in the UFC’s office in Las Vegas. Estrada said the staff continually adjusted its designs because the Sphere’s 160,000-square-foot interior screen — nearly triple the size of a football field — created an unusual aspect ratio.

“It’s like part stadium, part IMAX theater, part concert,” Estrada said.

The creative team enlisted a technician from U2’s residency and completed test runs at the Big Dome, the Sphere’s quarter-size replica in Burbank, California. As Saturday approached, they rehearsed in Las Vegas, sometimes at odd hours like 3 a.m.

Two days before the fight, production personnel tested the Sphere’s audio and video by mimicking fighters’ walks to the octagon.

The UFC used lights behind the Sphere’s video screen to illuminate the octagon, instead of using its traditional overhead grid-like lighting structure atop the cage, which White said required a four-month troubleshooting process. It also used new equipment for sweeping camera angles of the Sphere for the television broadcast.

“The Sphere is its own character in all of this,” said Matt Kenny, vice president for programming and acquisitions at ESPN, the UFC’s distribution partner. “You have a venue with a natural curiosity factor.”

Putting the night together, though, was incredibly costly. White initially estimated it would cost $8 million, but the budget ballooned to $20 million, about 10 times as much as a standard fight. Even as the price climbed, White had support from his boss.

“How can you deny somebody that’s that passionate about something?” said Ari Emanuel, the chief executive of Endeavor, the sports and entertainment conglomerate that bought the UFC in 2016. (Last year, Endeavor consolidated the UFC and World Wrestling Entertainment into a publicly traded company, TKO.)

To offset the cost, the UFC allowed Riyadh Season, a Saudi Arabian festival organized by the government’s General Entertainment Authority, to prominently sponsor the event as part of a larger partnership. Saudi Arabia has ambitiously invested in boxing, golf and soccer, which many observers say is a method to distract from the country’s human rights record. Emanuel said he was unconcerned about potential backlash.

When the UFC took over the Sphere, other sports executives were watching.

The boxing promoters Eddie Hearn, who has said he would like to host a fight at the Sphere, and Oscar De La Hoya were in attendance. Koester, the venue’s president, said she considered the event a success and would be open to accommodating more sports, though she declined to disclose if there were any active conversations.

But Emanuel said the UFC or WWE would not call the Sphere home.

“It’s so expensive to go in there,” Emanuel said, adding, “but we wanted to take this shot.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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