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‘Cheer’ School Navarro College Only Made $30,000 From Netflix Series
Jennifer Maas TV Business WriterRival Texas schools Navarro College and Trinity Valley Community College each were paid $30,000 for their participation in the second season of Netflix’s “Cheer,” a price that was set in the initial location fee agreement between Navarro and the show’s production company before “Cheer” became a smash-hit streaming sensation.As first reported by Variety‘s sister site Sportico, “In 2018, Navarro signed a deal with a production company in which the school agreed to be paid $30,000 for the rights to film a season of a then-untitled cheerleading documentary, according to a copy of the rights agreement obtained by Sportico.”The pact has a built-in exclusive option for “Cheer” producers to renew at the same $30,000 fee each year for five additional academic years, giving the production company “exclusive rights to film and exploit the Cheerleading Athletics as part of the Series” during the contract’s term period. “Everybody thinks we made a million dollars off of the show, and as you can see from the contract, we did not,” Stacie Sipes, Navarro’s director of marketing and public information, told Sportico.Sipes says that Navarro hasn’t seen its student body increase based on the popularity of Netflix’s Emmy-winning “Cheer,” which launched just before the pandemic and features Navarro’s head cheer coach, Monica Aldama, and her team.“We have had declining enrollment,” Sipes told Sportico.
