Chapter 849: The Action Scenes Duke Mocked

Many people watched the spectacle unfold, feeling that Duke and his Los Angeles Raiders were getting exactly what they deserved, but Duke leveraged the media and every other channel at his disposal to exert immense pressure on NFL officials.

"If the officials cannot find conclusive evidence that we deflated the footballs during the game, then I expect the league to apologize to our entire team for this investigation—especially to Tom Brady. The league's handling of this matter and the public fallout have been deeply frustrating. I just want to reiterate one point: I firmly believe the Raiders did absolutely nothing wrong!"

At a Warner Brothers press conference, Duke's rhetoric grew even sharper.

Meanwhile, the NFL's largest officially licensed sporting goods vendor reported that ever since the investigation report came out, sales of Tom Brady's personal merchandise had skyrocketed, doubling in volume.

The NFL sponsor stated, "We believe this is because the fans want to rally together in support of Brady and the Raiders."

North America was a land steeped in commerce; in the face of enough financial interest, most problems ceased to be problems at all.

Just as Duke had said, compromise wasn't necessarily a sign of weakness. Under pressure from all sides, the NFL finally issued a penalty, but it amounted to little more than a slap on the wrist.

The Los Angeles Raiders were fined $500,000, and Tom Brady was personally fined $250,000.

And that was it...

This infuriated many onlookers who had been eagerly waiting for drama, such as Mark Cuban, the notoriously outspoken owner of the Dallas Mavericks.

"Maybe this is a case of 'the cover-up is worse than the crime.' He can destroy a mobile phone, and he can break the rules of the game, 'but he always manages to get away with deceiving the league commissioner.' What you cannot argue, however, is whether this fine is a sufficient penalty for making a fool of the NFL commissioner. The NFL cannot let players, agents, and lawyers think that when you do something wrong, it's fine as long as you can destroy the evidence."

"This is going to destroy the integrity of the league. If this happened in the NBA, I think he'd be suspended for at least a quarter of the season. So even though I know Raiders fans won't agree with me, I still believe that a fine is far too light a punishment for trying to destroy evidence."

Duke couldn't even be bothered to respond; the two of them simply existed on entirely different levels.

The NFL wielded immense influence across North America, naturally turning "Deflategate" into a hot topic. Even O-Coal joked during a routine White House press briefing that their policies wouldn't be like a game played with deflated footballs.

Before the start of the new NFL season, "Deflategate" essentially came to a close. Duke had basically gotten the result he wanted, and the Los Angeles Raiders certainly wouldn't take such a meager fine to heart.

Last season, the NFL generated $9.5 billion in total revenue, while the Los Angeles Raiders brought in over $500 million, netting more than $100 million in pure profit. Not only was this far above the average for the league's thirty-two teams, but it also made them the highest-earning sports team in the world.

That amount of money might not have been much to Duke, but for Leonardo DiCaprio, who held a ten percent stake in the team, it was a massive surprise. After all, a dividend payout in the tens of millions of dollars was by no means a small sum to him.

This indirectly proved just how terrifying the NFL's influence truly was.

By any metric, the NFL was the most successful sports league in history.

In fact, whenever the four major professional sports leagues in North America were discussed, professional football was usually mentioned first before the others.

Without a doubt, the most popular television program in North America for years had been the annual Super Bowl. The NFL had left a profound mark on the public consciousness; the television coverage of its annual draft alone drew much higher ratings than the championship series for both basketball and baseball.

Even the spring announcements for the NFL's new season schedule could become major news events; even the highly lucrative Premier League only generated half the revenue of the NFL.

However, the NFL hadn't always seen this level of success. While it had been widely popular from the 1960s through the 1990s, it hadn't yet reached such a fever pitch.

Heading into the nineties and the new century, the NFL adopted aggressive marketing strategies, sparking a phenomenon that turned passersby into fans, regular fans into loyalists, and loyalists into absolute fanatics.

During the football season, the most popular television programming was the Sunday NFL games. In the stadiums, the league averaged 70,000 fans per game, making the NFL the most heavily attended sports league in the world, second only to auto racing.

Yet for an NFL team, ticket sales were little more than pocket change on the balance sheet. The real driving force was television broadcasting rights, as over ninety percent of NFL fans had never watched a game in person.

However, massive popularity did not necessarily translate to sheer corporate size.

Compared to its rivals, the NFL was a league, but compared to other commercial capital, it was only a mid-sized enterprise—roughly the scale of a regional tool-and-die manufacturer. The NFL's total revenue for the previous season was about $9.5 billion.

Walmart's revenue over five hours was higher than an NFL team's annual revenue.

In fact, in the Los Angeles area, the revenue of a single Walmart store was roughly on par with that of the Los Angeles Raiders.

But the NFL and its teams could generate immense influence, particularly across North America, which was the main reason Duke had purchased the Los Angeles Raiders.

The NFL prohibited corporations from holding a majority stake in its teams, which meant the owners were a collective of high-profile billionaires like Duke, who knew exactly how to cater to the public's tastes.

Just as Duke had said, more than half of the team owners had inherited their teams; the rest had simply not been operating long enough to pass their teams down to the next generation.

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, who had been thrust into the center of the storm by Duke, might frequently face criticism from the media and the public.

In reality, however, these criticisms could not overshadow his two outstanding achievements: first, vastly increasing the NFL's revenue; and second, keeping the seventeen primary owners happy.

Judged by these two standards, he could easily be considered the best commissioner in the sports world. In 2005, right before Roger Goodell took office, the NFL's annual revenue was only $6.5 billion.

As for why the NFL's revenue had skyrocketed in recent years, Duke had looked into it after purchasing the Los Angeles Raiders, and it mainly came down to the rise in television broadcasting fees.

Two-thirds of the NFL's revenue came from television broadcasting, and the league renegotiated these television contracts every few years.

Consequently, NBC, CBS, Fox, and ABC's ESPN would start a bidding war; whoever offered the most money won the broadcasting rights.

Looking at the NFL's glorious history, this was absolutely a successful case of sports marketing. This year's Super Bowl drew 114 million television viewers nationwide, once again breaking the previous year's record and retaining the honor of the most popular television program in history.

Compared to Lauder Stadium's seating capacity, the vast majority of the Los Angeles Raiders' fans sat in front of their televisions, so the operational goal Duke set for the team was simple: create the most easily consumable product.

In other words, the Los Angeles Raiders needed to satisfy the audience's desire to watch the game and spend money while sitting on the sofa.

This was also an important reason why the team had achieved $500 million in revenue last season.

Once "Deflategate" gradually died down, Duke stopped concerning himself with the Los Angeles Raiders and poured all his energy into the pre-production for The Dark Knight Rises.

The production team also confirmed their final cast member. Sienna Miller, who had played the Baroness in G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, had jumped ship to ICM a few years prior, and on Nancy Josephson's recommendation, Duke decided to cast her as Miranda Tate.

In addition, Christian Bale, Gal Gadot, and Dwayne Johnson also began rehearsing some action scenes.

As everyone knew, Batman eschewed weapons in favor of close-quarters hand-to-hand combat. To compensate for this, action choreographer Jimmy Carter specially designed a mixed martial arts style for him, one that could be dynamically upgraded at any time based on Batman's own physical condition and the situation with his opponent.

As a counterbalance, Duke also meticulously prepared extraordinary fighting capabilities for Bane, allowing him to easily snap anyone's neck and even beat Batman into a miserable pulp.

This kind of zero-distance physical combat required Christian Bale and Dwayne Johnson to pour immense energy into rehearsals. However, with Bale having the foundation of the two previous films under his belt, and Johnson already being a professional-grade action star, the difficulties they encountered were far fewer than expected.

Additionally, Duke threw Margot Robbie into the action training. Her role was still strictly under wraps, however; aside from Duke, Robbie herself, and a select few people like Tina Fey and Anna Printz, hardly anyone knew who she was playing.

Per Duke's instructions, Jimmy Carter's stunt team designed a specific action routine for Margot Robbie centered around the use of a baseball bat.

Duke knew perfectly well that if the film was going to captivate audiences, the action sequences were crucial. He wasn't the director from his past life; he had built his career on action blockbusters, and from choreography to filming to editing, this was what he did best.

In the original version of the film from his past life, the action sequences were nothing to write home about, if not outright abysmal. Had they not been propped up by a powerful industrial system, the combat would have barely earned a passing grade. The clash between the police and the thugs, in particular, was genuinely painful to watch; setting aside the poor quality of the choreography, it completely defied normal human logic.

Then again, maybe all those thugs released from the prison had simply been locked up so long they had lost their minds.

After all, a portion of them had been locked up in a mental hospital, and from a worldview perspective, the Joker was in there too—so perhaps they had caught it from the Joker.

These were just Duke's idle musings. Due to its setting, The Dark Knight Rises couldn't compare to The Dark Knight, but it remained a rather excellent film. Still, much like Duke's own inability to direct comedy, every director had their flaws, and the original director of this trilogy had genuinely been unsuited for action choreography.

By the end of September, the production crew's prep work was fundamentally complete. The few remaining tasks, such as the computer effects production that had already begun earlier, could easily continue concurrently with filming.