The World Cup is halfway through its run, and the spending patterns around it are clearer than the tournament bracket. Nike and Adidas are taking opposite approaches with their media budgets. Home Depot is using the event to prove out a thesis about Hispanic audience targeting that has nothing to do with soccer cleats. James Corden is back on television after three years, hosting a late-night format built entirely around the tournament’s schedule.
Three organizations, three very different calculations about the same 30 days of programming. The divergence tells you more about where media investment is heading than any single campaign could.
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Beyond the World Cup, a separate set of bets is landing closer to the ground. In Los Angeles, showrunner Mara Brock Akil is funding a screenwriting residency out of her own pocket, building pipeline infrastructure the industry used to maintain. Jennifer Garner is pushing California lawmakers to rethink film tax credit caps. And two genre projects are moving through their respective distribution pipelines, reminders that the content machine keeps running regardless of what dominates the news cycle.
Three Ways to Spend on the World Cup
Nike and Adidas are spending radically different amounts to achieve roughly the same objective. According to ad spend estimates reviewed by Digiday, Nike is outspending Adidas by a wide margin, leaning into broad reach and high-frequency placements. Adidas is running leaner, focusing on targeted buys and fewer but higher-impact creative executions. Both brands have official apparel deals with national teams. Both are fighting for the same consumer mindshare.
The spending gap tells you Nike believes the tournament requires saturation to win. Adidas is betting that precision and brand equity carry more weight than raw impressions.
What makes less intuitive sense is why Home Depot is investing heavily in World Cup media. The company sells power tools and lumber.
The answer is audience composition and retail media strategy. Home Depot’s consumer base skews toward Hispanic households, and the company views the tournament as a proving ground for its broader retail media capabilities. A concentrated window to test creative, optimize targeting, and build brand association with a demographic segment that it considers a major growth opportunity. Less about immediate conversion, more about validating media infrastructure capable of scaling beyond “tentpole” events.
Then there is James Corden’s Fox show, “After Hours With James Corden,” which reunites the host with his “Late Late Show” production team for a limited-run World Cup after-show. Fox is using the tournament to experiment with a format between traditional late-night and live event coverage. Corden is using it to re-enter the U.S. television landscape three years after leaving CBS.
The show runs only as long as the tournament does, which reduces risk for Fox and gives Corden a low-stakes test of whether his audience appetite has recovered. If it works, there is a template for how talent can return to broadcast without committing to multi-year deals. If it does not, both sides walk away cleanly.
The through-line: the World Cup functions as a strategic forcing mechanism. Nike, Home Depot, and Fox are all using the same event to test very different hypotheses about media spending, audience targeting, and format viability. The tournament does not create these strategies. It accelerates them and provides cover for bets that might otherwise take years to greenlight.
Investing in LA’s Creative Pipeline
Mara Brock Akil is funding a three-month screenwriting residency in Los Angeles’s West Adams neighborhood, next door to her own production offices. The Writers’ Colony announced its summer and fall 2026 cohorts in early June, offering emerging writers structured development time, mentorship, and proximity to an active showrunner.
The development pipeline has narrowed over the past five years. Brock Akil is building it herself, using personal capital to create the kind of talent incubator the industry stopped funding when it shifted toward IP-driven production models.
The residency is small by design. Cohorts are limited, and the program focuses on writers who already have professional experience but need time and space to develop original material. A targeted intervention at the career stage where writers either break through or leave the industry entirely. The program also keeps talent in Los Angeles, which matters for what follows.
Jennifer Garner is pushing California lawmakers to uncap the state’s film tax credit, arguing that keeping production in Los Angeles is critical for both economic and creative reasons. California’s program caps how much production activity the state can subsidize. Projects compete for limited incentives, and losing that competition often means shooting elsewhere.
This connects directly to Brock Akil’s residency. Talent development matters less if there is nowhere to deploy that talent. If productions keep leaving California, the writers emerging from programs like the Writers’ Colony have fewer opportunities to convert residency experience into professional work.
Garner is making the case that LA’s infrastructure advantage (crew depth, vendor networks, post-production facilities) only functions if there is enough production activity to keep it viable. The tax credit debate is really about whether California is willing to pay to maintain that viability or let the ecosystem erode in favor of lower-cost jurisdictions.
Both stories are about investing in Los Angeles as a place where creative work happens, at different scales. Brock Akil is funding individual careers. Garner is advocating for policy that affects the entire production economy. The common thread: both recognize the current system is not maintaining itself.
Genre Projects in Motion
Malaysia’s Abnormal Studios has picked up theatrical distribution rights for “Mimpi Kita: Castle in the Air,” a science-fiction fantasy feature that participated in the NAFF Project Market’s It Project strand at the Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival. Abnormal Studios will handle distribution in Malaysia and Brunei.
What is notable: genre content at the lower budget end is finding distribution through regional players who can commit to theatrical releases in smaller territories. The project is going to theaters in two Southeast Asian markets, a more sustainable revenue model for a film at this scale than competing for attention on a global streaming service.
At the other end of the budget spectrum, Paramount Animation has set a release date for Dan Trachtenberg’s “Freddy the 13th” adaptation, an animated family horror comedy based on Yehudi Mercado’s indie comic. The release date confirms the studio is committing theatrical distribution resources to an IP that originated outside traditional publishing or franchise ecosystems. Trachtenberg’s involvement (he directed “Prey” and “10 Cloverfield Lane”) gives the project credibility, and Paramount Animation is betting horror-comedy animation can work as a family-friendly theatrical release.
These two stories share genre and timing. One is a Malaysian sci-fi fantasy finding regional distribution, the other a studio-backed animated adaptation of indie comic IP. Both show that genre content continues to find paths to market regardless of broader industry headwinds, and that fragmentation is creating opportunities for projects that would not have been commercially viable under the old theatrical-first, studio-controlled pipeline.
What This Means
The World Cup spending divergence should shape how media professionals think about tentpole events. The gap between Nike and Adidas suggests targeting and creative execution may matter more than raw spend in certain contexts. Home Depot’s retail media experiment tests whether non-endemic brands can use sports programming to validate broader audience strategies. Corden’s Fox show is a template for how talent can re-enter television without long-term commitments.
The LA stories are about infrastructure, which is always less visible than content. Brock Akil’s residency and Garner’s tax credit advocacy are both attempts to preserve systems the industry has stopped maintaining on its own. If you are a writer or producer based in Los Angeles, both efforts directly affect your ability to work in the city long-term. If you are considering where to build your career, the tax credit debate signals whether California intends to remain the center of U.S. production.
The genre stories are reminders that the content pipeline is wider and more varied than the headlines suggest. If you are building a career in genre content, understanding how projects like “Mimpi Kita” and “Freddy the 13th” get financed and distributed is more useful than tracking what Netflix is greenlighting.
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