LeBron Is Taking His Talents to Hollywood
What does King James’s rapidly expanding media empire mean for him, his team and the future of humankind?
Los Angeles is the world’s biggest exporter of entertainment. The media that comes out of L.A. shapes global culture, makes superheroes out of mere civilians and presidents out of assholes. The puppet masters behind the 300-billion dollar global TV and film industry aren’t just ballin’, they hold massive sway over the way people dress, talk and think. For that reason they’re some of the most powerful people in the world. Now LeBron James wants to join their ranks.
LeBron’s move to join the Los Angeles Lakers this NBA offseason was predicted by sports pundits for months before it happened. They pointed to his two L.A. mansions. They pointed to his offseason workouts in L.A. They pointed to the iconography of the Lakers franchise and its ability to elevate even LeBron’s indelible legacy. They pointed to the treasure chest of assets the Lakers have and their willingness to use them to win in the short term. They also pointed to Hollywood, the entertainment mecca, and the allure of media mogul-dom it offers anyone with the cache (and the cash) of a LeBron James.
Ever the statesman, LeBron has pointed to basketball reasons for why he moved. But in the weeks since he signed, it’s become impossibly clear that proximity to Hollywood is why LeBron chose the Lakers.
The list of LeBron-involved and LeBron-adjacent media projects is swelling like it’s trying to be Charles Barkley’s body double. Meanwhile the NBA season is less than a month away and the Lakers have a brand new roster that’s equal parts talented head-case and youthful naiveté, which begs the question: Can LeBron really carry a basketball franchise and a media franchise on his shoulders at the same time?
For someone like LeBron, who’s had his life filmed since high school, and has always relished the limelight, the appeal of living next door to Hollywood is obvious. His camera-friendly flair is apparent during every halftime interview and post game presser. If his interviews aren’t proof enough of his commitment to thespianism, his flops are. He even took his knack for acting to the big leagues with a legitimately funny supporting role in 2015’s Trainwreck.
Beyond acting, LeBron has dabbled in digital content creation since 2014 via his multimedia platform for athletes, UNINTERRUPTED. The platform, which started as a series of brief testimonials from athletes, eventually garnered investment from Warner Bros. and Turner Sports.
Considering his robust history with the entertainment industry, maybe the real question regarding LeBron’s move to L.A. isn’t “Why?” but “Why did it take so long?”
When LeBron announced his signing he proved all the sports pundits who bet he’d be wearing purple and gold in the 2018–19 season right. But in making the move out west, he also bet on himself. Not in the basketball sense. We all know what he can do on the court. The Lakers are suddenly a playoff contender in the west and, depending on how their young core develops and whether their band of misfit veteran signings can mesh, they might even push to make the Western Conference Finals.
LeBron’s basketball team will be good this year.
What’s less certain is how LeBron the producer, director, actor, host, show-runner, and media magnate will do, but he’s off to a fast start.
In just this offseason the list of entertainment projects tied to LeBron has grown to include: The Shop (a roundtable discussion show featuring prominent athletes and entertainers that takes place in a barbershop), Brotherly Love (a sitcom based on the life of Philadelphia Sixers star Ben Simmons), Best Shot (a YouTube docuseries chronicling Jay Williams’ involvement with a New York high school basketball team), Warriors of Liberty City (a Starz docuseries about Miami’s famed Liberty City Warriors youth football program and its uncanny knack for producing NFL talent), Hoops (a drama about an ex-WNBA player trying to become the first head coach of a men’s college basketball team), I Am More: OBJ (a Facebook Watch series that follows Odell Beckham Jr. through the NFL season), Shut Up and Dribble (a Showtime docuseries, and backhand to the face of Laura Ingraham, about the overlap of sports and politics), Student Athlete (an HBO documentary about the NCAA’s controversial treatment of athletes) and Space Jam 2.
This list constitutes only a part of LeBron’s ballooning IMDb.
Spring Hill Entertainment, LeBron’s production company, has over a dozen TV projects either in development, production, or currently airing.
LeBron is serving only as an executive producer on most of these projects, so the level of creative authority he’ll have over them will likely be small, if he has any at all — think Tyron Lue coaching LeBron’s Cavaliers.
Despite the hands-off nature of LeBron’s involvement in these projects, the roster is dizzyingly long. To put it in perspective, if you printed out all of LeBron’s current entertainment ventures on a receipt, that receipt would be longer than the single strand of lab-grown orangutan hair that is laid, laboriously, back and forth over Donald Trump’s head every morning before he talks to the press. It’s enough projects to make you wonder how many is too many for a guy with a day job as the star of the Lakers.
Just figuring out how to play basketball with Lance Stephenson is a full-time gig. Running a multimedia business on top of that? Seems grueling. Even with talented people to delegate much of the work to.
We’ve seen the NBA Superstar-turned-storyteller thing go sideways before, though I’m still pulling for Kobe. I imagine it’s hard, when you’re famous, to find people willing to give you honest feedback. That’s probably how we end up with things like Kobe’s Musecage. So it’s not hard to imagine LeBron making some missteps in handling his newfound access to Hollywood. This is, after all, the guy who thought it was a good idea to make The Decision a prime time TV event.
But how many projects have to flop before the LeBron media machine breaks down? How many games do the Lakers have to lose before the press starts asking if LeBron is spread too thin? If Space Jam 2 is great, will any of the flops even matter? What if there are no flops? What if LeBron is actually great at running a media factory? What if he’s great at running a media factory and he brings a championship to L.A.? Does he then run for president? And if he wins that? What does that mean for you and me? How are we supposed to hold our heads high knowing there’s someone out there crushing life so fucking comprehensively? More importantly, what does it mean for the human race? Do we even have the means to cryogenically freeze LeBron’s DNA and, in the case of a massive extinction event, use it to restart humanity thus avoiding the loss of thousands of years of human evolution?
These are all questions that we should start addressing sooner rather than later. Then again, LeBron is probably already addressing them in a docuseries.
