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Franchises don’t get better than The Walking Dead. He has huge hits in everything from comics to TV shows to games.
The Games alone have 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 that year was the third television series to It was seen, 13 years later The television program was launched.
Hernan López, founder of Owl & Co., said in an interview with Gamesbeat that The Walking Dead, which debuted as a comic from creator Robert Kirkman in 2003, is the most successful original entertainment franchise created this century. In 2010, Kirkman started Skybound Entertainment with David Alpert.
They wanted to build an intellectual property company aimed at developing IP across all media. They established a “writer’s room,” overseen by Kirkman, to figure out different paths for the entertainment property to go. And over the past two decades, Kirkman noted in our 2023 interview, game movies and TV shows ultimately turned out to be good because the creators were gamers. At the same time, The Walking Dead has been a success on many platforms. And Skybound raised funds in 2022 to double down on its strategy.
Lopez doesn’t have 2024 numbers yet, but he believes the success continued.
“There has never been a show like this,” Lopez said.
The Walking Dead franchise ran for more than 330 episodes across seven live-action television series, and continues to break records for Netflix as new generations of viewers discover it. The commitment alone is worth $83 million a year to Netflix, considering its average hourly cost per view, Owl & Co. said.
The Walking Dead games in particular have generated more than $1 billion in consumer revenue. The games generated $100 million in revenue 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 more than $300 million in revenue.
“It’s become a massive hit here in the United States, but it’s also No. 1 in 150 countries around the world,” Skybound CEO David Alpert said in an interview with GamesBeat. “It is one of the three best shows worldwide right now on Netflix. That blew my mind.”
Alpert noted that her daughter was born the same year the program began. Now he’s old enough to watch it with his friends on Netflix.
“There is an entire generation that has grown up hearing about this show and hearing about the success and having read the comics and played the games and bought the merchandise. They’ve seen that all done by their older brothers and their parents,” Alpert said. “People are rediscovering it. This whole generation is finding this great 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 became an umbrella for numerous creators trying to achieve the same thing. Now he’s pushing the Invincible series on Amazon’s main TV platform. The success of The Walking Dead gives the company the creative freedom to pursue other opportunities and take on 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 is still a massive seller. Overall, it shows that zombies are always fertile ground for video games, but for the IP to last this long means its universe and experiences are like no other, he said.
Historically, the company has licensed its property to others to make. 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 Walking Dead Game series based on storytelling. Each game became a hit in its respective category.
But when Telltale folded (later to be reborn), Skybound bought back the narrative game series and published it as a catalog title. Lopez said the staying power of the show has been incredible.
“Its episode and season-to-season retention rate is far above any other show on Netflix,” Lopez said. “The Walking Dead is the #1 franchise in entertainment for shows that are not aimed at children and are created entirely in this century.”
However, while printing money, Skybound has been taking a lot of risks.
“A lot of other farms or trades in the world are basically the same thing over and over again,” Alpert said. “We actually have a universe full of one set of rules and characters, but there is a complete opportunity to tell new stories.”
The show’s characters are popular, but so are those like Clementine from the Telltale game. Many of them are created in a writer’s room with an ordinary architect.
“That’s all Robert Kirkman,” Alpert said. “He’s the genius who figures out how to approach it, and he’ll architect it “so that there are intersections with other parts of the franchise.”
He added: “(Everything) exists in the same universe. It roots you and bases you in the Walking Dead universe, but it doesn’t limit you to only seeing the characters we see in the comics. It gives you the opportunity to find your own way in what you do best, and I think that’s been one of the reasons we’ve been so successful.”
While the success is surprising, it creates a problem reminiscent of The Innovator’s Dilemma, a nonfiction business book by the late Clay Christensen. He noted that successful companies are so focused on exploiting their singular success story that they fail to 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, notes that the company continues to invest in comics. Focused on telling new stories, these comics can try new ideas and become television shows, movies, or games. Finally, they can also generate a lot of retail merchandise sales. The source for much of it is Kirkman, but the company also engages with other creators, as well as a sort of third-party publisher for IP.
“People have seen zombie stories before, but his story wasn’t just set in the zombie world. Its concept was what happens after the zombie movie ends,” Alpert said. “How do they live in a world where zombies are? Your world has been rocked. What are you doing the next day?
The company is starting to invest more in Invincible, which started around the same time The Walking Dead came out. That story about superheroes focused on family relationships, like an Oedipal complex. The hero faces an impossible choice of saving the earth and siding with one family member over another.
“I think that’s something that every teenager can relate to and every adult can relate to because they’ve been through some version of that themselves,” Alpert said. “Both The Walking Dead and Invincible are 21 years old at this point. So they’ve been in the public consciousness for, you know, two more decades. And the funny thing is that a lot of people are just discovering invincible now.”
He said that those worlds that Skybound has are mature enough that, with appropriate 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 points in their history, they were worth emulating or cautionary tales. With Harry Potter, both children and parents can enjoy the stories. Some fans will lapse, but they often return 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 in its release year, but it also has to compete with all the previous releases that are also popular. The same goes for television shows.
The goal becomes “finding things that cut through the noise that cut through the clutter in any medium,” he said. We live in an era of abundance where distribution is overwhelming. There is distribution everywhere.”
One lesson is that the franchises that already exist will continue to have relevance in people’s current entertainment diet.
“It’s like physics, where something in motion will continue to move,” 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 difficult years. They have had tensions like strikes around AI. There are still great successes and still winners and losers.
In terms of navigating new trends like AI, Alpert believes that respecting IP is critical to being accepted or not. Companies have to adopt AI in the right way.
“We are going to continue expanding the world of the walking dead. Let’s find new places to expand the stories. I don’t have a specific announcement yet, but I think we’re examining what the best medium is. What’s the best genre to do something really new with The Walking Dead? We can take in all this new excitement and commitment. How do we push it forward? We don’t want to do the same old thing.”
Disclosure: I have family members working for Skybound.
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