Brace Yourself: Mike Tyson is Stepping Into the Ring With Hulu
Have we learned nothing from Winning Time? When the sports drama—which promised to gleefully tell the (slightly fictionalized) tale of the Showtime-era Los Angeles Lakers—hit HBO early this year, it didn't garner much interest. Then? The likes of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Magic Johnson started bashing the show, which just so happened to give the series a ton of buzz and a Season Two order.
Now, we have a new sports series on the docket, one that also doesn't have the support of its subject: Hulu's Mike. Set to debut on August 25, Mike will see Moonlight's Trevante Rhodes play Mike Tyson, showing how the Brooklyn native became a legendary boxer. (TBD on whether or not we'll get a full recreation of Tyson's cameo in The Hangover.) If you were wondering if Mike was written and filmed with the full support of the boxer in question, well, it most definitely was not. Last year, Tyson criticized Hulu for giving the green light to a "tone-deaf cultural misappropriation of my life story."
Now, Tyson has taken to the preeminent shit-stirring platform for boxing-adjacent beef nowadays, Instagram, to voice his displeasure with the series. In the first post, Tyson accuses Hulu of trying to pay UFC president Dana White to promote Mike. “Hulu tried to desperately pay my brother @danawhite millions without offering me a dollar to promote their slave master take over story about my life," Tyson wrote. "He turned it down because he honors friendship and treating people with dignity. I'll never forget what he did for me just like I'll never forget what Hulu stole from me.” In the second post, Tyson likens Hulu to "the streaming version of the slave master," alleging, "They stole my story and didn’t pay me.”
While Hulu hasn't responded to Tyson's newest claims, Craig Erwich, President of ABC Entertainment and Hulu Originals, told Deadline last year, "Biographical pictures are a fan favorite and a staple of the movie and television business and frequently the subjects are not involved." At TCA last week, Karin Gist, a showrunner for Mike, said at TCA, "We just wanted to tell an unbiased story and have the audience decide what they think or feel."
We'll keep you posted if anyone behind Mike responds to Tyson directly. Regardless, it sounds like we'll have another Winning Time-esque beef brewing this summer.
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