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Skydance Sports secured the right to hear Lewis Hamilton’s next pitch before competing buyers do.
The agreement gives Dawn Apollo a multiyear first-look relationship with Skydance Sports, the sports entertainment business inside Paramount Skydance. Hamilton’s company will develop scripted, unscripted, and animated projects, and he will serve as an executive producer across the slate. The relationship could also reach Paramount’s video game and consumer-products businesses.
What Is a First Look Deal?
A first-look deal gives a studio the first chance to review a production company’s projects. The Television Academy Foundation’s industry glossary describes the usual exchange plainly: a producer receives support such as overhead or office space, and the studio receives the first look at projects in development.
Each contract sets its own rules. The public announcement did not disclose Dawn Apollo’s overhead payment, submission window, hold period, matching rights, ownership terms, or any guaranteed development spend. A typical first-look agreement allows a producer to shop a project elsewhere after the preferred buyer passes, though the contract may specify how quickly and under what conditions this can occur.
My read is that Jesse Sisgold bought optionality on Hamilton’s creative life after Formula 1. Skydance can inspect each idea before another buyer sees it, choose the projects that fit its appetite, and leave the rest. It gets proximity to one of the world’s most marketable athletes while keeping every serious capital decision at the project level.
Hamilton gets something he needs more than another room full of famous people: a repeatable route from an idea to a buyer. Skydance can help Dawn Apollo package writers, directors, talent, and financing, then place the finished proposal with Paramount or another distributor. Skydance’s current sports slate already spans Netflix, Prime Video, Apple TV, Roku, Hallmark, ESPN, and HBO. Sisgold’s group knows how to build for the buyer rather than waiting for a single platform to solve every project.
Hamilton Belongs in the Room
Dawn Apollo already owns one exceptional credit. Hamilton produced Apple’s F1 with Jerry Bruckheimer, Joseph Kosinski, Brad Pitt, Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner and Chad Oman. We identified that production stack in 2022, when Apple first bought the project. Apple’s production credits place Dawn Apollo Films alongside Apple Original Films, Warner Bros., Formula 1, Plan B and Jerry Bruckheimer Films.
The machine worked.
F1 earned $634.1 million worldwide, received four Academy Award nominations and won Best Sound. Apple calls it the highest-grossing sports feature ever. Hamilton helped give Kosinski and Bruckheimer access to the paddock, kept the racing honest enough for drivers to recognize their world, and lent the production the trust required to film across live Grand Prix weekends.
That is real proof of Hamilton's ability to contribute to a difficult production with several powerful partners, and his name carries commercial value beyond a cameo or a red carpet appearance.
Dawn Apollo’s next test is harder. It must originate a project, package it, protect a meaningful share of the economics, and carry it into production. F1 showed that Hamilton can improve somebody else’s enormous film. The Skydance relationship will test whether his company can repeatedly create properties that buyers want.
We have followed Hamilton’s broader attempt to convert fame into authority in What’s Past Is Prologue. Dawn Apollo is the piece with the best chance of creating an asset that will outlast his racing career. A library can earn, travel, and grow long after a driver’s final season.
The Hire
Hamilton launched Dawn Apollo in 2022.
Apple announced a feature documentary about Hamilton in March 2022. Box to Box currently lists Lewis as in production, with no release date on the project page. In Japan this March, Hamilton described a five-year plan that includes an F1 sequel, his own scripts, a television series and at least one documentary he has written. He had already told reporters in Monaco that he was developing three film concepts and expected to work with a screenwriter because he had never written a screenplay.
Five-year plans are patient by design. Development calendars are less romantic. Scripts need notes, talent needs attaching, budgets need approving, and buyers need convincing. A famous founder can accelerate introductions. He cannot skip the work between them.
That makes Naomi Wright the person to watch. The former Fulwell Entertainment executive joined Dawn Apollo as senior vice president of development this summer. In her own description of the role, Wright said she is working across scripted, unscripted and podcasts to help build the company from the ground up.
Wright gives the ambition a calendar. Her job is to find material, develop it, kill weak ideas early, and keep the surviving projects moving when Hamilton is at a race. A production company becomes credible when executives can carry the slate between the founder’s appearances.
Skydance Knows the Game
Hamilton is entering a system that Sisgold has spent five years assembling.
Skydance Sports launched in 2021 and later formed a joint venture with the NFL and NFL Films. Its output ranges from Air on Prime Video to America’s Team: The Gambler and His Cowboys on Netflix. The studio also works through talent agreements. Kylian Mbappé and Zebra Valley signed a multiyear first-look in October 2022 covering sports, culture, and identity across scripted and unscripted projects.
Skydance signed Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen to an overall deal in March 2025 for scripted, unscripted, and branded content. Eighteen months later, Paramount+ launched NFL Play Action, a 13-episode weekly series executive-produced by Allen, Skydance Sports, and the NFL.
That show is smaller than a theatrical feature and commercially useful for the same reason. A half-hour weekly format gives Paramount+ fresh NFL programming, gives Allen an executive-producer credit attached to an actual release, and gives Skydance a repeatable production.
Hamilton’s likeliest first win follows that logic. An unscripted project costs less, moves faster, and makes immediate use of the access he already controls. A scripted film or animated feature may create more valuable IP, but it has a much longer path to a green light. Skydance can develop both while allowing the cheaper format to prove that Dawn Apollo can deliver on schedule.
I’m also curious to see if the video game pathway comes to fruition, although that is surely a ways out.
End of 2027
The weak point is equally clear. Dawn Apollo has one released credit, developed inside a giant Apple production, while its Hamilton documentary has remained in production since Apple announced it in 2022. Skydance has also signed athlete-led relationships whose public output took years to appear, if it appeared at all.
My POV: by the end of 2027, Skydance will move one Dawn Apollo project unrelated to an F1 sequel into funded production or sell it to an outside platform. Unscripted is the favorite because the path is shorter and Hamilton’s access supplies the raw material. Animation is the longer bet. Games and merchandise come later, after an original property provides something worth extending.
Business of Speed covers the business, technology, and lifestyle of racing: Formula 1, IndyCar, IMSA, WEC, NASCAR, and more. From Vincenzo Landino, entrepreneur and creator, featured in Bloomberg, TBPN, Yahoo! Finance, Forbes, Adweek, and Front Office Sports. You can find us on Instagram, Substack, and LinkedIn.
