In the mid-2000s, Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman’s quest was to create the anti-Marvel with a flesh-chomping pop-culture phenomenon. But his bigger challenge: redefining how Hollywood works.
Getting Started
Kirkman’s game plan was to take his Walking Dead comic book series and turn it into a TV show. Then follow up on the success of the TV show with a video game version.
There are two critical things that Kirkman did that upended traditional Hollywood business:
- Embrace direct-to-TV for movies instead of the traditional theater move release to pay-per-view TV transition.
- Create a company that at its core was run by comic-book creators.
This was all before COVID forced major studios to rethink how they released movies.
Did Kirkman’s Strategy Age Well?
With the continued growth of Netflix, Amazon, Apple TV, and other outlets, he was well ahead of the direct-to-TV release route.
But with Artificial Intelligence (AI) development moving faster than even the most optimistic supporters anticipated, to a certain extent, his work to focus the core of his business on comic-book creators seems like the work of a near-term futurist.
That same team could very well be in the position of using AI to write stories and create visuals and movies based on the team’s input in the coming years.
Hollywood Business Relationship
Just as has already happened in the music industry, will traditional Hollywood even have a role in future movies? Distribution could go the route that music has already taken: the artist retains one of many distributors to handle the task for a low fee. And funding could come from the same crowd-fund method that Brandon Sanderson used for a recent fiction book or venture capital.
There’s been a lot of pushback on people who crowd-fund as well as many people with the Do It Yourself (DIY) ethos, but much of that sentiment is from people who have a financial or cultural bias toward doing things the way they’ve always been done.
Besides, there’s been a long tradition of music people who have been forced into adopting DIY to succeed. Joan Jett always comes to mind. After being rejected by everyone in the music industry, she created her own record label and launched a remarkable artistic career. And that was back in the 1980s.
From my perspective, the Jetts, Sandersons, and Kirkmans, are the future.
Photography credits |
Tom Libertiny (Cover of Shelby Kramer)