ESPN, Pixar, the NFL, and Beyond Sports Team Up for ESPN’s Dec. 8 ‘Monsters, Inc.’ ‘MNF’ Altcast Effort

An NBA ‘Dunk the Halls’ altcast is scheduled for Christmas Day

The ESPN Edge conference celebrated its fifth anniversary last week and gave ESPN a chance to discuss the evolution of current content offerings, hint at the future, and offer the inside scoop on upcoming projects. Topping the list? Animated telecasts, including a Monsters, Inc.-themed Monday Night Football altcast on Dec. 8 and an NBA “Dunk the Halls” animated telecast on Christmas Day.

“Everybody wants to do the best work they can, and we’re very confident that we can keep moving forward,” says Michael “Spike” Szykowny, VP, edit, animation, graphics innovation, and creative production, ESPN. “We’re always pressing forward to try new things and will continue to do that in the future. If we do that, everything else is going to take care of itself. That’s how we look at it.”

The ESPN Edge conference was held a couple weeks after ESPN’s Beyond Sports and Sony’s Hawk-Eye divisions announced that ESPN will produce animated telecasts for NFL, NHL, NBA, and WNBA games across Walt Disney Co. and ESPN platforms during the 2025-26 season. The initiative began with the NHL Big City Greens Classic in 2023, and, since then, the NFL has partnered on multiple Funday Football presentations, powered by the NFL’s Next Gen Stats and utilizing Disney’s Toy Story and Simpsons IP. The NBA has also joined in with “Dunk the Halls,” featuring popular Disney characters, and a second NHL Big City Greens Classic in 2024.

“At ESPN,” says Kevin Lopes, VP, sports business development and innovation, ESPN, “innovation has always been a driver in serving sports fans, including reaching new audiences. The Beyond Sports team has helped fuel our animated alternate casts, along with our league partners, creating an entirely new way for fans to consume our content. We look forward to continuing to produce these unique experiences for fans both this year and in the years ahead.”

At the ESPN Edge conference in New York City last week, (from left) The NFL’s Josh Helmrick, Beyond Sports’ Tommy Bauman, Pixar’s Jay Ward, and ESPN’s Mike “Spike” Szykowny discussed ESPN’s upcoming Monsters, Inc. MNF broadcast.

Animated broadcasts have come a long way since the first Big City Greens NHL broadcast in 2023, and ESPN Edge featured key partners in the animated-telecast–development cycle: Jay Ward, creative director, franchises, Pixar Animation Studios; Tommy Bauman, business development lead, Beyond Sports; and Josh Helmrick, senior director, media strategy, business development, and next-gen stats, NFL.

“The most fun part about doing these,” adds Szykowny, “is that we have a blast working together. I love working with every one of these guys.”

Making animated telecasts a reality is a big lift for ESPN, with the broadcaster’s animation team and Creative Studio team handling about 90% of the work, along with Toronto-based Big Studios. Live rendering during the game is handled by Beyond Sports.

“Pixar gives us stuff to work with,” Szykowny explains. “Their art director takes us through some things, and we storyboard together. Other times, we just bring them stuff and say, ‘What do you think?’”

Adds Ward, “Typically, it’s storyboards or animatics first so we can give notes before it gets to a phase where it’s troublesome to fix. We work a lot like the way a feature film would work.”

Although many adult viewers may scratch their head, the appeal of animated telecasts is not lost on studios like Pixar or broadcasters like ESPN. “You already have people that are fans of Toy Story or fans of Monsters, Inc.,” notes Szykowny. “We want to do things that are authentic to those fans. But it’s also a chance for a kid who maybe isn’t a football fan to watch this with their favorite characters and get introduced to that world. And it’s a way for a parent who normally would watch the game alone to hang out with their kids and watch the game together. It’s just a win-win.”

The Monsters, Inc. telecast will take things to a new level. It will feature ever-improving and ever-more-accurate graphics but also Billy Crystal, the voice of Mike; John Goodman, the voice of Sully; and Bob Peterson, the voice of Roz as a sideline reporter. Their involvement will make the viewing experience that much more compelling and livelier.

“They’re all going to be there,” says Ward.

Making sure the voices and animated characters are as authentic as possible is only part of the challenge. The other half is ensuring that animated representations of the real-world NFL players accurately track the body (and ball) movement on the field.

Helmrick notes that the technology for tracking both players and ball continues to evolve rapidly. “This is the first year we’re tracking in every venue. The Hawk-Eye data has gotten better, the optical data has gotten better, and we’ve had more testing opportunities.”

It’s all part of a plan to leverage tracking, which, from the get-go, was designed to benefit teams, players, coaches, and fans. “One of the key tenets of that was always new media experiences for our fans,” he adds. “Once we had this data, we first set out to build the best tracking platform we could, and then we’d figure out use cases. One of the early ones was how to help improve the experience for fans. By working with somebody like ESPN, who had the foresight, and Beyond Sports, who could take this to the next level, it has come a long way.”

Early animated broadcasts simply had player- and ball-location data, which was groundbreaking but nowhere near the level that Beyond Sports, ESPN, and the NFL have taken things today.

“The active tracking, which is in the shoulder pads, is a reliable data feed,” notes Bauman. “We can take the optical tracking from Hawk-Eye, which is tracking 29 points of the body, giving us detailed movements on top of the active data. It’s the best of both worlds as we get visually natural movements of the players on the pitch, and it’s live.”

Combining optical and tracking data also removed any occlusion issues on the optical-tracking side (for example, players’ seeming to merge or blocking the tracking of another player), which was a very important step. “When you marry optical data with the wearable data,” Helmrick explains, “you get a continuous stream. When you turn that over to somebody like Beyond Sports, they can take it to the next level.”

An animated telecast, however, involves a lot more preproduction planning and creation of elements than a regular live sports production. For example, the fans in the stands had to be drawn (literally and figuratively) from the Monsters, Inc. universe.

The circled Monsters, Inc. characters are the ones that “made the cut” and will be the fans in the stands on the Dec. 8 altcast.

“The Monsters, Inc. world is full of creatures of different shapes and sizes of claws or tentacles or 15 eyeballs,” says Ward. “We started with some of the original artwork we created for the movie all those years ago and how we created the background monsters for the film and applied that to the stands. [To be included,] those monsters had to have two arms and two legs; having six arms or five heads just didn’t work.”

Adds Szykowny, “The [monster fans in the stands] have a neutral state, where they’re kind of hanging in there, and we have insane mode, where we can hit it and they all go crazy. Every stadium has an exclusive club, and so we had to put one in, which we call the Canister Club, where the monsters can hang out.”