🍿 Comic Con shows what’s next for the entertainment industry

Last week saw a number of shifts in the entertainment industry, the largest of which was the long-sought merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. into Skydance, but also saw Netflix indicating that it was weighing layoffs, and Disney indicating it may directly take on Imax. At a glance, the fortunes of the entertainment sector appear to be shifting rapidly, with the future of it relatively cloudy. 

Last week, though, New York Comic Con offered insight into the future of the industry and intriguing clues as to why the entertainment properties that draw the most eyeballs are increasingly rarely coming from boardrooms in Los Angeles. 

• Remember, entertainment companies are not structured to make money from new ideas. They are companies designed to extract continuous, multifaceted value from ideas they already own. 

• Disney is the archetype of this. Making $12 from a movie ticket is nice, but once the customer is sufficiently entranced by the character, they make $30 from the Halloween costume, $20 from the doll sale, $10 a month from the Disney+ subscription to rewatch the movie, a thousand or more from the cruise and Disney World trip, $80 for the Broadway show ticket, and so on. 

• Historically generating new ideas was done through internal R&D (like making a new movie or character) but lately these companies have been more content to acquire R&D from other, smaller shops. Disney buying Lucasfilm or Marvel fits this model. Amazon Prime’s two biggest shows, “The Boys” and “Invincible,” each raiding the independent press section of the comic shop is another. 

• You can also see how the failure to make a property sufficiently exploitable can cause a problem. Take Netflix; on one hand, they certainly made some ancillary money from its demogorgon stuffies and Broadway show, but “Stranger Things” won’t be stuffing a lot of stockings this year despite the enormous IP investment. On the other hand, “KPop Demon Hunters,” which they bought off Sony, stands to be like every third Halloween costume this year. 

NYCC is illuminating because it shows the sources of original and speculative R&D on the rise, what’s resonating with audiences, and what’s going to sui generis pop, revealing which fast-growing franchises will be the next Marvel, the The Walking Dead, the next Romantasy to highlight three franchises that were big at NYCC well before becoming billion-dollar grossers for these large content exploitation companies. 

• Dan Buckley, the publisher at Marvel, spoke candidly at the ICV2 Insider Talks panel about why comics have historically been of interest to these large companies: it is a relatively capital-unintensive business. Basically, you can make a comic and if it fails, no biggie. This same is true of books, manga, webtoons, really any situation where you’re paying one creator and shipping cheap pixels or dead trees. It’s not the case with a $200 million movie. 

• If there was a star of this year’s NYCC, it’s likely “Dungeon Crawler Carl” scribe Dan Dinnamman, whose books have been a breakout hit of the emerging LitRPG genre; Comcast snagged the rights for that, which is developing a show for Peacock. 

• For that matter, books, comics, and manga in general: per the ICV2 White Paper presentation, graphic novel sales are up 28% in the first half of 2026, and manga sales are up 39.5% in the book channel; it should not come as a surprise that Netflix (with “One Piece”) and Sony (through Crunchyroll) are pushing manga adaptations.

• Realistically, breakout IP hits are what define the long-term success of these megacompanies and will define their businesses for the coming years far more than any corporate structure. You make lots of cheap bets and one of them resonates with audiences at which point you can roll it into your lucrative (though capital-intensive) businesses, like cruises and theme parks.   

Sure, there is fear, uncertainty and doubt about the Warner-Paramount merger within the industry, but its success or failure will likely be defined less by how efficiently they can exploit existing IP — like the announced GI Joe and Transformers adaptations, which I’m certain will be incredibly culturally relevant when they eventually come out — but rather if they make savvy decisions about what new material to buy up.

The Takeaway

One deal in particular announced last week is intriguing for the future of where these companies are going to source the next generation of stories, and it’s not two dessicated cable companies casting their lots together. 

Marvel announced a few new projects to compete for new readers, including book publication formats that imitate the smash-hit DC Compact Comics, which in turn imitate the overwhelmingly popular manga book format. But the big one is that after years of unsuccessfully attempting to win over mobile phone-using audiences, Marvel has cut a deal with Webtoon, which dominates the category, to launch its Marvel Comics by Webtoon app. 

This solves a thorny problem for Marvel: how to get its comics into the hands of young consumers whose hands are generally full with their phone. Webtoon, which has 145 million monthly active users and skews young, has solved that. When Marvel wants to make a Spider-Man t-shirt, they don’t build a t-shirt factory, they license it out to the experts; this tie-up is much the same. It also links up Webtoon — which, like Marvel, operates in a relatively low capital-intensive business of webcomics — tighter with Disney, which knows better than anyone how to take a solid idea and turn it into a movie ticket, or a Halloween costume, or a doll…

– Walt Hickey

• 🏈 NFL: The Bills take on the Rams in what may very well be a Super Bowl preview, given that these team are each perched atop their respective conference when it comes to Super Bowl chances. The Rams are a favorite in this matchup, with markets pricing a 63% chance they win.

• 🎬 Oscars: The tepid response to “Digger” has only slightly dimmed Tom Cruise’s shot at an Oscar this year, according to markets, with the actor still a 14% chance to win the Best Actor category, though that is both down from a high of 33% in September as well as in fourth place overall. 

*Event contracts are offered through Robinhood Derivatives, LLC — probabilities referenced or sourced from KalshiEx LLC or ForecastEx LLC.

That’s the current expected sale price for the top forecasted item at an upcoming major Bonham’s auction from the archives of Stanley Kubrick. It’s for the Star Child prop from the end of “2001: A Space Odyssey.” More of a horror guy? On a budget? The axe from “The Shining” is expected to sell for £30,000 to £50,000.