Franchises don’t get better than The Walking Dead. He has huge hits on everything from comics to TV shows to games.
The games alone generated more than $1 billion in revenue, and the Netlix show attracted 1.3 billion hours of viewing in 2023, according to a report from Owl & Co. and during this year , it was the third most watched television series – 13 years after the TV show was launched.
Hernan Lopez, founder of Owl & Co., said in an interview with GamesBeat that The Walking Dead, which debuted as a comic book from creator Robert Kirkman in 2003, is the most successful original entertainment franchise created this century. In 2010, Kirkman launched Skybound Entertainment with David Alpert.
They wanted to build an intellectual property company aimed at developing IP across all media. They set up a “writer’s room,” overseen by Kirkman, to figure out the various paths to entertainment ownership. And over the past two decades, Kirkman noted in our 2023 interview, gaming movies and TV shows ultimately turned out to be good because the creators were gamers themselves. At the same time, The Walking Dead has been a success on many platforms. And Skybound has raised funding in 2022 to double down on its strategy.
Lopez doesn’t have 2024 figures yet, but he believes the success has continued.
“There’s never been a show like this,” Lopez said.
The Walking Dead franchise has had more than 330 episodes across seven live-action television series, and it continues to break records for Netflix as new generations of viewers discover it. The commitment alone is worth $83 million a year to Netflix, based on its average viewing hour, Owl & Co said.
The Walking Dead games in particular have generated over $1 billion in consumer revenue. The games generated revenues of $100 million each for The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners and the Walking Dead: Survivals. The Walking Dead: Road to Survival has over $500 million in revenue and 100 million downloads. And The Walking Dead: The Telltale Definitive Series has 80 million episodes sold for over $300 million in revenue.
“It’s become a huge hit here in the United States, but it’s also No. 1 in countries in 150 countries around the world,” David Alpert, CEO of Skybound, said in an interview with GamesBeat. “It’s a Top Three Show globally right now on Netflix. This genre blew my mind.
Alpert noted that his daughter was born the same year the show began. Now she’s old enough to watch it with her friends on Netflix.
“There’s an entire generation that grew up hearing about this show and hearing about the success and reading the comics and playing the games and buying the merch. They saw this all done by their older siblings and parents,” Alpert said. “People are rediscovering it. This whole generation finds this massive success. That’s the biggest story here.
Kirkman started what was once called transmedia until people decided it was a dirty word because so many transmedia efforts failed. But somehow Kirkman made it work. Skybound Entertainment has become an umbrella for many creators trying to accomplish the same thing. Now he is pushing the Invincible series to Amazon’s main TV platform. The success of The Walking Dead gives the company the creative freedom to pursue other opportunities and take more financial risks.
The company continues to publish The Walking Dead Deluxe Comics (193 issues to date for the comics). And the Telltale Game series continues to be a massive seller. It shows in general that zombies are still fertile ground for video games, but having the last time that its universe and its experiences are not like others, he said.
Historically, society has licensed its property for others to do. Scopely made The Walking Dead: Road to Survival Mobile Game, while Skydance made The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners – a VR, console and PC title. Telltale made the narrative-driven Walking Dead game series. Each match became a success in its respective category.
But when Telltale closed (later to be reborn), Skybound bought the Narrative Game series and released it as a catalog title. Lopez said the staying power of the show has been incredible.
“Their retention rate from episode and season to season is way higher than any other show on Netflix,” Lopez said. “The Walking Dead is the #1 franchise in entertainment for non-kid shows that created this century entirely.”
Yet as it prints money, Skybound has taken a lot of risks.
“A lot of other farming or marketing in the world is basically the same thing over and over again,” Alpert said. “We actually have a universe filled with a set of rules and characters, but there’s a whole opportunity to tell new stories.”
The characters from the show are popular, but those like Clementine from the Telltale game are also like Clementine. Many of them are created in a writer’s room with a common architect.
“It’s all Robert Kirkman,” Alpert said. “He’s the genius who sort of figures out how to approach it, and he’ll architect it” so there are intersections with other parts of the franchise. “
He added: “[It all] exists in the same universe. It tells you and pulls you inside the Walking Dead universe, but doesn’t limit you to only seeing the characters we see in the comics. It gives you a chance to find your own way into what it does best, and I think that’s one of the reasons we’ve had such success. “
While the success is incredible, it creates a problem reminiscent of The Innovator’s Dilemma, a nonfiction business book by the late Clay Christensen. He noted that successful businesses focus so much on exploiting their singular success that they cannot start a viable second business. They have such high expectations for the new business that it can never live up to the first success.
Alpert, however, emphasizes that the company continues to invest in comic books. Focused on telling new stories, these comics can test new ideas and become TV shows, movies or games. Ultimately, they can also generate lots of retail merchandise sales. The fountainhead for much of this is Kirkman, but the company also engages with other creators as well as some sort of third-party publisher for IP.
“People have seen zombie stories before, but his story wasn’t just in the zombie world. His concept was what happens after the Zombie movie ends,” Alpert said. “How do they live in a world where there are zombies? Your world has been shaken. What do you do the next day »
The company is starting to invest more in Invincible, which started around the same time The Walking Dead appeared. This superhero story focused on family relationships, like an Oedipal complex. The hero faces an impossible choice of saving Earth and defending himself with one family member over another.
“I think it’s something that every teenager can relate to and every adult can relate to because they’ve experienced some version of this themselves,” Alpert said. “The Walking Dead and Invincible are 21 years old at this point. So they’ve been in the public for, you know, two decades. And the funny thing is, a lot of people are discovering invincible now. »
He said these Skybound worlds are mature enough that, with proper management and reinvestment, the company can continue to make them evergreen fields. »
There are older intellectual properties to follow in terms of business strategy, such as Star Trek, Star Wars, Harry Potter and James Bond. At different times in their history, they were worth emulating or were tales of caution. With Harry Potter, children and parents can enjoy the stories. Some fans will be thrown off, but they often come back to the show and catch up.
As for the future, Alpert noted that there are thousands of new games coming out. Any new game has to compete with those from its release year, but it also has to compete with any past releases that are still popular. The same goes for TV shows.
The goal becomes “finding things that cut through the noise that cuts through the clutter in any medium,” he said. We live in a time of many things where distribution is overwhelming. There is distribution everywhere. »
One lesson is that the franchises that exist will already continue to have relevance in people’s current entertainment diet.
“It’s like physics, where something in motion is going to continue to stay in motion,” he said. “People know about them and discovery is the biggest challenge for any content we have out there.”
As for the state of the industry, the gaming industry and Hollywood have had a rough few years. They had tensions like strikes around AI. There are still big successes and winners and losers.
As for navigating new trends like AI, Alpert believes that respecting the IP is key to knowing whether or not it will be accepted. Businesses need to adopt AI the right way.
“We will continue to expand the world of The Walking Dead. We’re going to find new places to expand the stories. I don’t have a specific announcement yet, but I think we’re kind of looking at what the best medium is. What’s the best genre to really do something new with The Walking Dead? We can take all this new excitement and engagement. How are we moving forward? We don’t want to just do the same old thing.
Disclosure: I have family who work for Skybound.
