Livescore
Fight promos tend to be something of a paint-by-numbers type of endeavor.
If you have a fight to sell between two big guys, you use the ad to talk about how big they are. If it’s two really good guys, you tell us how good. If they hate each other, the bad blood thing always plays. Even if they don’t hate each other, just get them to glower into the camera and then you can pretend they do.
You’re not making “Citizen Kane” here, is the point. You’re taking 30 to 90 seconds to try to convince us to watch a prize fight on TV. So film some shirtless shadowboxing in a gentle mist, have both guys turn slowly to the camera and cross their arms menacingly, and then move on. Right?
Then along comes this ad for Saturday’s heavyweight title rematch between Oleksandr Usyk and Tyson Fury in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. This thing is two minutes and 14 seconds long and it feels like something Variety would describe as “a mind-bending horror flick.” It not only looks and feels like an actual movie trailer, it even has a cohesive narrative and internal logic. It also, just to be totally clear, is completely insane as a commercial to advertise a boxing match.
In case you haven’t already seen it, here’s a quick breakdown of how this thing starts:
0:05: We open with Fury seemingly in therapy, anxiously rubbing his hands in the universal posture of a man wondering where to possibly begin in describing his deep-rooted psychiatric problems.
0:10: Cut to a hospital room where Fury is waking up from some procedure, only to see the face of the kind, matronly nurse suddenly morph into Usyk’s, complete with his signature crazy eyes.
0:18: We see a plane land, and hear Fury’s distinctive voice asking, “How was your flight, rabbit?” A dumbfounded Usyk, looking up from the backseat of the car, sees Fury’s face in the rearview mirror. But when the driver actually turns around, no, of course it’s not really him. It’s just some guy. We catch just enough of a glimpse of Usyk’s face to realize that he, too, is confronting the possibility that he is losing his grip on reality.
It continues like this. Here’s Fury walking down the street and, completely unnecessarily, shouldering some bloke out of the way on the sidewalk. When he looks over at a policeman writing a parking ticket, yep, the face belongs to Usyk. The old woman with the walker who passes him? Also Usyk. And the little girl holding her mother’s hand? You already know it’s Usyk.
And, naturally, when Usyk is stopped on the street by a man returning his dropped wallet, he can only watch in horror as Fury’s face appears in the back of the man’s head. Later he sees Fury’s face in a pack of chicken sausage, on a punching bag, at a surprise party, and finally as a giant stone cave-like thing that appears out of nowhere as he’s driving.
Fury, for his part, sees Usyk in the face of his wife, his therapist, and a politician on TV, to name just a few. Even his gloves have grown Usyk’s buck teeth, which is kind of a genius touch, to be honest.
In fact, much of what takes it from clever concept to a disturbingly compelling piece of media are these little touches. It’s not just the faces appearing. It’s the little nicknames, the Easter eggs, the callbacks to weird and memorable moments of their rivalry. (You knew Fury’s dad would show up and head-butt something or someone, right?)
In the end, we see Usyk standing in front of a burning building (this part is never explained, because why would it be) phoning Fury to tell him: “Tyson, we need to end this.” He doesn’t even sound angry, is the thing. It’s more like he knows that he can’t keep living this way, with Fury in his head.
That’s what makes it work not just as a bizarre, attention-getting ad, but also as an overarching narrative for the fight itself. Here are these great boxers, both of them with championship careers, and they are tormented by invasive and increasingly unhinged thoughts of one another. Their rivalry threatens to break their respective grips on reality. They are, in fact, losing their damn minds. And the only way to settle it is to fight each other — again. By the end, it doesn’t even seem like something they want to do so much as something they have to do.
The version posted to Turki Alalshikh’s YouTube page racked up more than 9 million views in a little over two weeks. According to sources at BigTime Creative Shop, which was responsible for the ad, the most challenging aspect was the tight timetable. They had a limited window for filming these scenes before both fighters would sequester themselves in training camp. Since the whole thing is pretty heavy on the effects (you think it’s easy making the back of a guy’s head look like the front of a different guy’s head?), they also needed a lot of post-production work.
In total, according to BigTime Creative, the whole thing went from concept to finished product in less than three months. And while a lot of pro fighters might have balked at the idea of portraying themselves as lunatics driven to the ragged edge of madness by a rival, Usyk and Fury were apparently into it.
“There wasn’t really any pushback from the fighters or their teams,” said a source at BigTime Creative who did not wish to be named. “They did have input on certain takes where they felt they might be overacting or coming across as too aggressive in specific moments. However, when it came to the overall scenarios and concept, there were no concerns or changes — they were fully on board with the vision.”
The vision honestly does work, mostly because it feels like it’s based in something real. Fans who have followed the Usyk-Fury saga know how long they’ve been talking and thinking about each other, since long before the first fight. The idea that it’s become an unhealthy obsession feels genuine. That also helps shift the narrative of the fight from “so we’re doing the same thing again?” to “we must do this one final time so that we may finally rest.” It’s a deft way of taking one potential weakness of the matchup and turning it into a strength.
It’s also just plain fun in its utter insanity. To go so over the top with an ad for a boxing match is at once absurd but also refreshing, at least for those of us who feel like we’ve seen some version of the same ad for decades now. This one, if nothing else, is creative. It’s trying to do something different. That something may be completely bonkers, but at least it’s new. And damned if it doesn’t also get you just a little more excited for the actual fight.
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