A year ago Dana White vowed to put on the ‘greatest sport event on earth’ at the Sphere arena in Las Vegas to celebrate Mexican Independence Day, but now less than a week out from UFC 306 (aka Riyadh Season: Noche UFC) the UFC CEO has admitted that he doesn’t know if it’s going to be any good or not.
Noche UFC will be the promotion’s most expensive event by a huge margin, with the production bill coming in at over $20 million for an ambitious visual spectacle at the one-of-a-kind Sphere arena that will take full advantage of it’s enormous LED screen to celebrate Mexican Independence Day like no-one has ever done before.
The plan is to have short chapters of a movie playing in-between the 10 fights on the card that will highlight Mexico’s contribution to combat sports, leading to each bout then being fought within their own unique ‘world’ backdrops.
It’s an intriguing concept, but the catch is that due to how unique and complex it is to produce an event of this magnitude in an arena like no other in the world, even White acknowledges that they don’t know how it’s going to go on the night.
“Does it work? Is it great? Is it awesome? Does it suck? We don’t know and we won’t know until it’s over but we’re going to try it,” White admitted to John Morgan on his Grind City Media YouTube channel.
White went on to explain just how complicated a process it’s been to turn his dream for this event into a reality.
“Figuring out the lighting was the first thing, that took four months,” said White: “It took four months just to figure out the lighting and then it took months to assemble a team to help us pull this off.”
“I’ll give you another example; say we do a show open on a regular Saturday night, that thing renders in a couple of hours – it takes 12 days to render anything that changes, we had to build a ‘render farm’ inside the Sphere, literally built our own render farm in there.”
And even at this late stage in the production with less than a week to go before fight night, White says he’s unsure how distracting the background visuals will be for the fighters.
“We don’t know [if it’ll distract fighters], we don’t know until late Saturday night,” White said.
