With the Winter Olympics in Milan just around the corner, Warner Bros. Discovery has partnered with the International Olympics Committee to make its Looney Tunes characters a bigger part of the games through original content and on-site activations.

WBD already has had a licensing deal in place with the IOC since 2024, spanning Looney Tunes- and Olympics-branded apparel, toys and collectibles. But this time around, Bugs Bunny will break up WBD’s broadcast/streaming coverage of the Olympics as a guest interviewer, as well as hosting daily segments in which he highlights top moments from the games.

This original content will roll out across WBD’s linear and digital channels, including Eurosport, Cartoon Network, HBO Max (which only launched in Italy this month) and Looney Tunes and WB Kids social/YouTube channels. WBD also plans to run on-site activations including branding the Olympic Pin Trading Center with Looney Tunes imagery. (Pin afficionados from all over the world traditionally gather during the games to trade with each other.)

The Olympics draw a lot of eyeballs on both TV and social media; in 2024, for example, roughly five billion people followed the games, according to the IOC.

Sports have been in the Looney Tunes DNA for a while now, perhaps best evidenced by its two Space Jam movies (1996 and 2021). So an expanded Olympics partnership would seem to make sense for the brand. And this isn’t brand-new territory for WBD, which launched a sports special on TNT in 2022 in which the Teen Titans analyzed an NBA slam dunk contest.

Doing more than just licensing with Looney Tunes at the Olympics also jibes with the IOC’s stated priority to attract younger viewers to the Olympics with “new trends”. The games have been trying harder to reach this audience in recent years through things like introducing the sport of breakdancing in 2024, and announcing plans to launch the first-ever Olympic Esports Games. (The IOC later scuttled this Saudi Arabia event, but has expressed continued interest in eSports and a desire to try again elsewhere.)

What the IOC has going for it is that many kids already love sports. KidSay polls from 2023 found that 92% of eight- to 11-year-olds in the US watch sports, play sports or play sports video games. And the Olympics are already popular with this demo; ahead of the Summer Games in 2024, research firms including Kids Corp and Kids Know Best found that most kids in the US, the UK and LatAm planned to watch.

The kids industry always gets into sports when the Olympics come around, whether it’s through licensing deals or producing sports-focused series (Netflix’s launch of WildBrain’s Finding Her Edge earlier this month is a perfect example). But it’s worth noting that Kids Corp’s research found that most brands target adult sports and older Olympic fans, perhaps missing out on a white-space opportunity to engage kids who are also watching.

Image courtesy of WBD.