By: Randy Davidson & Carol Badaracco Padgett
Founder and CEO of Georgia Entertainment & Senior Staff Writer
Holed up on the couch with a bowl of popcorn, hand sanitizer sitting on the coffee table, it became the norm during lockdown. Nothing could take us further from the stadium experience in ancient Rome, the bawdy gathering at a Shakespeare play, the theater full of teary-eyed story-lovers beholding opera or the rabid sports fan breathing in an arena’s sea of adrenaline and endorphins in any decade.
Sports have always had it right, with fans preferring to hang out in a live herd. But when it comes to entertainment, did history and our devices nearly pull us all apart?
This is 2026, though and entertainment is now amplified in a new and vivacious way. It’s amplified in terms of raw intensity, where we’re all there together right where we want to be since we washed the popcorn bowl and stuck it back in the cabinet.
Suddenly, we’re all sharing in the absorption of a fascinating communal-entertainment fusion.
Media merger
Today’s coupling isn’t like the Comcast and Warner Bros. Discovery variety. It’s more like world-class entertainers performing right in front of you in an ultra-intimate live venue where the farthest seat isn’t more than a basketball court length from the stage. Or it’s going to an entertainment venue and seeing a live event you’d never expect to find there.
The media merger leading into 2026 is a development that excites and inspires international entertainment executive Michael Fisk, and it’s one he’s actively developing as he stirs up a communal concoction of sports, cinema and live entertainment with all of it instantaneously available right in front of you on the big screen.
“Most people would rather have Wi-Fi than hot water,” Fisk muses, and he’s qualified to make that observation. His string of entertainment executive and producer experiences includes high-level time at Warner Bros., Sony Pictures, NBCUniversal, Lionsgate and others, traveling through time from dial-up to digital.
He even worked on Pierce Brosnan’s first James Bond film, which led to five more Bond films.
Then, with a new vision for entertainment, Fisk and his production partners went out on their own to explore live streaming and entertainment options and how to accomplish new communal experiences through technology.
“We founded Interstellar Entertainment [a production and financing company based in the U.K.], and we got tight with motorsports, soccer and other sporting companies and leagues. Most recently, taking FIFA soccer into movie theaters,” Fisk says. “We merged technology with cinema storytelling.”
And speaking of soccer, slated to ride high in both the South and around the world in summer 2026 with the FIFA World Cup in Atlanta, Fisk is enthrallingly on board in anticipation of the pulse-pounding play between FIFA’s U.S. World Cup matches and his communal-cinema-sports-storytelling experience.
“It’s the global sport everyone knows, and now the U.S. is getting to see that,” says Fisk, a kid who grew up on soccer. “It’s grown. We have this next generation growing up around so much soccer, with a focus on U.S. cities. [The World Cup in 2026] is like a test case to see if this country can handle it. It’s like the Olympics going to a whole new country … dealing with the heat and humidity of the South in the summer.”
And he adds, “It was a smart move by FIFA to do this.”
Sensing the spectacle much the same way as FIFA, Fisk admits he’s pitching a soccer docuseries, as well.
Soccer and cinema
Fisk loves to hear stories of Americans experiencing soccer communally for the first time, such as in a pub in Galway, Ireland.
But right there, he points out, that is for adults and out of the country. And a true community experience, in Fisk’s eyes, should enable parents to bring along their soccer-crazed descendants so everybody can go wild in a pile.
In this instance, the pub won’t cut it, but the cinema will when you live stream the soccer match onto the big screen, an experience he and his partners are pioneering in willing theaters across the nation. But will people go into a theater and watch a soccer match as willingly and energetically as they’d go into a stadium? Yes, Fisk finds. And for families, it’s cheaper, too.
“We love collecting things, the physical touch, the ‘being there,’” Fisk says. “For me, growing up in the U.S., we love cinema. With horror, you can get even more scared when other people are there. You have the best laugh like that. And you cry hard that way.”
Then, he underscores, “It’s the same with the communal aspect of sports. But we wondered, how do you get people back into the movie theater?”
So, Interstellar Entertainment teamed up to get live sports coverage into IPIC Theaters, which has over 20 venues around the country, each of them technologically tricked out for the highest in audience immersion. Distribution of the event was handled by Interstellar Entertainment, in collaboration with Western Film Services and Emerge Pictures, with DAZN providing the exclusive broadcast feed.
For viewing, IPIC reports it delivers content through 4K digital projection of encrypted digital files, as opposed to actual film. In terms of audio, IPIC says audio inputs are managed through a digital cinema processor, while an equalizer optimizes sound for each auditorium.
In addition, to deliver a prime communal experience, IPIC serves up food like a luxury restaurant and lets theatergoers choose from a chef-curated menu.
“You have Barcaloungers (luxury reclining chairs) and people with blankets, and you hit a button and people bring you food, wine, beer, soda,” Fisk describes. “We’re replicating the pub and you’re experiencing it with others.”
At one of Interstellar’s first FIFA match showings, a soccer mother with a 12-year-old pulled Fisk aside. “Oh, gosh, do more,” she said. “We can’t take him to the pub, and we want to go as a family.”
Her reaction showed Fisk that his mission was working—to open up the sport to more people, including kids. “What a great way to experience live sports, on a big screen and still have the communal experience, even though you’re not in the stadium,” he says.
“Nothing beats a stadium live,” Fisk adds. “But most people can’t fly to a final in, say, New Jersey. It’s pretty cool to see the halftime show, Doja Cat, on the big screen.”
Fisk’s 85-year-old mom in the New York area is using the movie theater to view the Metropolitan Opera, he says. “She could go to the Met; she’s in Connecticut (about an hour away), but the convenience is there. The movie theater is just 15 minutes away.”
Whether a live events venue is putting patrons face-to-face with performers in intimate venues or the theater is showing live soccer or opera, the convergence concept works.
And as Fisk adds, “From the fan perspective, it makes sense.”
Latency and latex
When the timing is just right, cinema fits the professional sports experience like a glove. And for the viewer, it’s oftentimes love at first sight. But streaming a live sport can drive you mad.
“With live streaming, you can’t have a room full of rabid fans and oops, it didn’t work,” Fisk emphasizes. “With film, you can just start it over if something goes wrong. But with live sports, you can’t just do it over—and someone will be on X and social media [if something goes wrong].”
Latency has always been a bitch, and here, it’s even more so.
“There’s no room to play, and the latency has to be high quality—it’s huge,” Fisk says of Interstellar’s live-sports-theater experience. “Because you can’t go back in time if you miss that goal. That’s the worst thing for fans to experience.”
Theaters have to be on the ball, too, if they want to keep happy fans glued to their seats.
“Theaters have to test it early and get more comfortable with it,” Fisk says of Interstellar’s live streaming approach. “There’s a way you transmit it from satellite to digital.”
The live sports content goes to outer space and beams back down, essentially, and theaters have to figure out how to get it onto the screen. “There isn’t a norm on how to do it right now,” Fisk says.
There are issues of encryption of the content, too, and making sure someone doesn’t hack their way in and steal the show.
“There are multiple technical considerations that need to be figured out and understood by each local cinema, and it has to be perfect,” Fisk adds.
Essentially, the feat is like hand-to-hand combat for cinemas, and they need all boots on the ground. “Each cinema has different projectors and [differing abilities]to do satellite and different broadband abilities. You must test every single theater.”
Alongside distribution, promotion has proven tricky for Fisk and his partners, so far. Not long before his recent FIFA match showing at IPIC, he wondered, “How do people find out about it?”
So Interstellar created a trailer two weeks beforehand.
“We packed the theater, but we had two weeks to do it,” he says. “People heard about it through social media and a newsletter for sports fans.”
Fans, too, Fisk has found, want to help promote the sports, brands and faces they love.
“There’s a fan community in North America called Men in Blazers, and we’ve approached them about how they can help promote. We’re thinking about how to market it,” Fisk says. “It’s important for local cinemas to lean into the fans.”
Fisk says he and his team are also busy teaching fans who attend live sports in cinemas to unlearn the rules they’ve used in the movie theater.
“Historically, we train people to be quiet–no phones—in the movie theater. And with this, we’re like, no, get noisy, cheer it on,” he closes. “And the lights can’t be totally dark, just dimmed. You want to see where your food is, and you want to see other people’s faces. Cheering is the fun part of it!”
They are also working to launch more live sports events in cinemas nationwide and are actively seeking new live sports content, whether from major leagues or emerging formats.
Convergence in media is about amplifying entertainment value and fostering a closer human connection. And about being unafraid to have some fun and make a little collective noise.
SIDEBAR:
Peachtree Road Taken
The Hollywood model has largely slipped away. And it’s one of the reasons the entertainment industry based in Georgia balks at the label, “Hollywood of the South.”
Where Hollywood once represented decades of closed-door meetings and entertainment executives calling the shots, Georgia represents open access for storytellers in every medium, and for those in any field—from filmmaking, music, gaming and branded content. In Georgia, creatives commune, collaborate and create in a streaming age where content consumers crave it all.
While others seem to be counting productions lost, Georgia counts all those gained. Georgia amplifies entertainment in all its forms.
In film alone, Georgia is literally everywhere. The Hawkins, Indiana, of “Stranger Things”. The Los Angeles of the film “The Idea of You”. And the New York City of “Spider-Man: No Way Home” and “Avengers: Infinity War”. In the crime film “Baby Driver,” written with Los Angeles as the backdrop, director and writer Edgar Wright changed the script to Atlanta when production set up shop in the Peach State.
With the rich locations in Georgia, the country’s largest array of studio and sound stage options, along with immersive LED technology capable of putting films in any setting in the world, Georgia has an undeniable gravitational pull. Filmmakers and creatives of all types feel it when they visit—oftentimes to fall in love with the New South, replant their lives and grow.
Second-generation Hollywood screenwriter Lloyd Schwartz acknowledges the pull. At the Cobb International Film Festival in July 2025 in metro Atlanta, sitting at the Earl and Rachel Smith Strand Theatre in Marietta, Georgia, before the screening of his independent film “Love and Taxes,” directed by Atlantan Ken Feinberg, Schwartz noted, “The talent is moving here.”
From Los Angeles, New York and other traditional entertainment hubs, creatives are relocating. Georgia represents the future, with everything they need to practice their art and thrive in a new economic reality forged from the fires of the pandemic and the strikes that followed. After the dust settled, when many others looked back and tried to recapture what they had lost, and still are, Georgia stood up and stepped forward. It’s still stepping forward.
And that, as Robert Frost put it, has made all the difference. The road … taken.
This article appeared in the 2026 edition of the Creative Economy Journal. See more from the Journal here.
