Cinetic Media founder and CEO John Sloss has launched Vertical Leap, an investment vehicle and producing pathway created exclusively for media-curious professional athletes, the company announced Monday.

Vertical Leap is built to give athletes more than the ability to back films for producer credits. Members gain a working seat inside Cinetic’s slate, with access to rough cuts, creative input and the same industry guidance the company provides the filmmakers behind its most successful projects. The goal is to prepare each member not just to back a film, but to eventually build a production career of their own.

“Vertical Leap offers a pathway for elite athletes to support commercial, impactful documentaries, while learning the ins and outs of film production from the most experienced storytellers working today,” Sloss said in a statement. “It is also a way for them to build something lasting beyond their playing days, expanding their brand, deepening their creative voice and putting real equity behind the stories they believe in.”

Sloss added: “For the documentary community, Vertical Leap brings the adrenaline jolt of a new class of collaborators, athletes with real creative instincts and the reach to bring documentary storytelling to audiences who might not otherwise find it.”

Cinetic is best known for structuring and executing landmark finance and sales transactions for independent films, including some of the most significant sales in Sundance and Cannes history. Cinetic has handled the financing and/or sale of more than 600 films and series, including “Hoop Dreams,” ESPN’s landmark series “30 for 30,” “Summer of Soul,” and this year’s Oscar contender “Once Upon a Time in Harlem,” as well as several of the most iconic independent films of the past 30 years such as “Napoleon Dynamite,” “Little Miss Sunshine,” and the Academy Award-winning Best Picture “Green Book.”

The youth demographic has been key to fuelling this summer’s box office boom.

Backrooms director Kane Parsons and Academy boss Bill Kramer were among those taking part in a Deadline-moderated Zurich Summit panel this past weekend which addressed theatrical success in the age of YouTube, TikTok and other online platforms.

Kramer thanked YouTube native Parsons for his film Backroom, which helped energise young audiences, and also noted how the youth demographic flocks to Academy screenings of classic cinema.

“Your fandom traveled from YouTube to the theaters, and we saw the same thing with Curry [Obsession director Curry Barker]. Young people want to go back to movie theaters…YouTube can inform a theatrical fandom.”

He continued: “We see this in our Academy Museum. We have two theaters, which show classic films and rep programming, but more than half of our ticket buyers are under the age of 40, and we sell out every screen. People love seeing movies in movie theaters. We just needed to attract new fans, and you helped to do that this summer.”

The 20 year-old Parsons, whose record-breaking Backrooms took $400M off a $10M budget, said he thought it was “reductive” to think that people his age were only interested in short-form content.

“I feel like this sentiment is weaponized, like it is algorithmically incentivized, but it’s not really something I think most people enjoy about their own wiring. They don’t love that their attention spans are being sucked into the spiral of mostly consuming stuff that is short. They’re still [enjoying] going into a closed room [cinema] without outside interferences.”

Later in the discussion, Kramer talked about the Academy’s eye-catching deal to make YouTube the free-to-stream broadcasting home of the Oscars from 2029, ending ABC’s run showing the awards.

Deadline moderator Andreas Wiseman asked whether the pact felt like a risk.

“Not at all,” replied Kramer. “It almost feels risky to not do it because we’re looking at the future. With each month, a larger percentage of the TV-watching audience is on YouTube.”

He continued: “We have a great partnership with Disney right now. They’ve been amazing partners and will continue to be for the next two years. But we’re already deep in discussions with [YouTube CEO] Neal Mohan and his team, and I think you’ll see a very different-looking Oscars that allows you to engage with the show in more interactive and deep ways than we can right now. It’ll be free to everyone around the world in over 30 languages. Right now, in certain markets, they show a reduced version of the Oscars. This allows everyone around the world to see the exact same telecast at the same time. That’s important to us.”

He expanded: “As we become more global as an organization, the best way for us to reach a global audience of film lovers, film fans, young artists is YouTube. I think the timing [syncs] this year with Obsession and Backrooms, and with the direction moving from YouTube to theatrical. We’re an organization that celebrates theatrical movie making, but at the same time, the Oscars is a TV show, and we want to reach a large audience. YouTube allows us to directly engage with our audience, our viewers, film fans, in a way that we just can’t do right now. Right now, more people outside of the U.S. watch the Oscars than in the U.S. The deal allows us to capture that audience and a lot more. That’s great for the Academy and it’s great for the films of that year, and it’s also great for film lovers around the world.”

The reporting at the time – and Deadline’s understanding – is that the deal was comfortably into the nine figures. Kramer wouldn’t be drawn on stage as to how lucrative the pact is but smiled and called it “a very good deal”.

ABC had been back in for the rights. Netflix was also in the mix.

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