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Franchises can’t be better than The walking dead. There are enormous hits on everything from comics to television shows to games.
The games alone have generated more than $1 billion in revenue, and the Netlix show logged 1.3 billion viewing hours in 2023, according to a report from Owl & Co. And that year it was the third most watched television series – 13 years after the TV show started.
Hernan Lopez, founder of Owl & Co., said in an interview with GamesBeat that The Walking Dead was debuted as a comic by the creator Robert Kirkman in 2003 is the most successful original entertainment franchise of this century. In 2010, Kirkman founded Skybound Entertainment with David Alpert.
They wanted to build an intellectual property company aimed at developing intellectual property across all media. Led by Kirkman, they set up a “writers’ room” to figure out the different avenues for the entertainment property. And in recent decades, Kirkman said in our 2023 interview, gaming movies and TV shows ended up being good because the creators were gamers themselves. At the same time, The Walking Dead was a hit on many platforms. And Skybound raised money to double its strategy in 2022.
Lopez doesn’t have numbers for 2024 yet, but he believes the success will continue.
“There has never been a show like it,” Lopez said.
The Walking Dead franchise has had more than 330 episodes across seven live-action TV series and continues to break records for Netflix as new generations of viewers discover it. According to Owl & Co., the commitment to Netflix alone is worth $83 million per year when the average cost per hour of viewing is taken into account.
The “Walking Dead” games in particular have generated more than $1 billion in consumer sales. The games generated $100 million each for The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners and The Walking Dead: Survivals. The Walking Dead: Road to Survival has grossed more than $500 million and has 100 million downloads. And The Walking Dead: The Telltale Definitive Series has sold 80 million episodes and grossed over $300 million.
“It’s become a huge success here in the U.S., but is also No. 1 in 150 countries around the world,” Skybound CEO David Alpert said in an interview with GamesBeat. “It is currently one of the top three series on Netflix worldwide. That kind of blew me away.”
Alpert noted that his daughter was born the same year the show began. Now she’s old enough to watch it on Netflix with her friends.
“There’s a whole generation that grew up listening to this show and its success, reading the comics, playing the games and buying merch. They saw all of this with their older siblings and their parents,” Alpert said. “People are discovering it again. This whole generation is experiencing this huge success. That’s the biggest story here.”
Kirkman founded what was once called transmedia until people decided it was a dirty word because so many transmedia efforts failed. But somehow Kirkman pulled it off. Skybound Entertainment became an umbrella for numerous developers who wanted to achieve the same thing. Now it’s pushing the Invincible series on Amazon’s Prime 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 comic issues to date). And the Telltale game series continues to be a best seller. It generally shows that zombies are always fertile ground for video games, but that the IP has endured for so long means that its universe and experiences are unique, he said.
In the past, the company has licensed the manufacturing of its properties to others. Scopely developed mobile game The Walking Dead: Road to Survival, while Skydance made The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners – a VR, console and PC title. Telltale developed the narrative game series “The Walking Dead”. Each game became a hit in its respective category.
But when Telltale (later) closed reborn) Skybound bought back the narrative game series and published it as a catalog title. Lopez said the show’s staying power has been amazing.
“Their episode-to-episode and season-to-season retention rate is far higher than any other series on Netflix,” Lopez said. “The Walking Dead is the No. 1 entertainment franchise for shows not aimed at children and created entirely in this century.”
But as Skybound prints money, it has taken a lot of risks.
“A lot of other exploitation or commercialization in the world is basically the same thing over and over again,” Alpert said. “We actually have a universe full of rules and characters, but there are also lots of opportunities to tell new stories.”
Characters from the series are popular, but so are those like Clementine from the Telltale game. Many of them are created in the writers’ room with a shared architect.
“It’s all Robert Kirkman,” Alpert said. “He’s the genius who will somehow figure out how to approach it and he’ll design it. “So there’s overlap with other parts of the franchise.”
He added: “(Everything) exists in the same universe.” It roots you and anchors you in The Walking Dead universe, but doesn’t limit you to just seeing the characters we see in the comics. It gives you a chance to find your own way to do what you do best, and I think that was one of the reasons we were so successful.”
Although the success is astonishing, it creates a problem reminiscent of “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” a nonfiction book on economics by the late Clay Christensen. He pointed out that successful companies are so focused on exploiting their unique track record that they cannot create a second profitable company. They have such high expectations of the new business that it can never repeat its initial success.
However, Alpert points out that the company continues to invest in comics. These comics focus on telling new stories and can test new ideas and become TV shows, movies, or games. Ultimately, they can also generate a lot of retail merchandise sales. The source for much of this is Kirkman, but the company also works with other creators as well as some sort of third-party intellectual property provider.
“People have seen zombie stories before, but his story wasn’t just set in the world of zombies. His concept was what happens after the end of the zombie movie,” Alpert said. “How do they live in a world where there are zombies? Your world has been rocked. What are you doing the next day?”
The company is starting to invest more in Invincible, which began at the same time as The Walking Dead came out. This story about superheroes focused on family relationships, like an Oedipal complex. The hero is faced with the impossible decision to save the Earth and side with one family member over another.
“I think this is something that every teenager and every adult can relate to because they’ve been through a version of it themselves,” Alpert said. “Both The Walking Dead and Invincible are 21 years old at this point. So they have been in the public consciousness for more than two decades. And what’s fun is that a lot of people are just discovering Invincible.”
He said that Skybound’s worlds are mature enough that, with appropriate management and reinvestment, the company can continue to make them evergreen fields.”
In terms of business strategy, there are older intellectual properties such as Star Trek, Star Wars, Harry Potter and James Bond. At various points in their history they were either worthy of emulation or were cautionary tales. With Harry Potter, both children and parents can enjoy the stories. Some fans will fail, but they often return to the show and catch up.
As for the future, Alpert noted that thousands of new games will be released. Every new game has to compete with those of its year of release, but it also has to compete with any previous releases that are still popular. The same goes for TV shows.
The goal is to “find things that cut through the noise, that cut through the clutter in any medium,” he said. We live in a time of abundance where distribution is overwhelming. There are distributions everywhere.”
One lesson is that the franchises that already exist will continue to be important in people’s current entertainment diet.
“It’s like physics, where if something moves, it continues to move,” he said. “People know them and discovering them is the biggest challenge for any content we have out there.”
As for the state of the industry, both the gaming industry and Hollywood have had difficult years. There have been tensions like strikes around AI. There are still big hits and still winners and losers.
When it comes to tackling new trends like AI, Alpert believes that respect for intellectual property is crucial to whether it will be accepted or not. Companies need to properly embrace AI.
“We will continue to expand the world of The Walking Dead. We will find new places to expand the stories. I don’t have a concrete 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 commitment. How do we move it forward? We don’t want to just do the same thing.”
Disclosure: My family works for Skybound.
