Thought: Comic books as a Minimum Viable Products for films

A recent episode of Start up mentioned some of the story/series based licensing deals Gimlet are doing - and my ears pricked up at the suggestion that Marvel had essentially used their comic books as a low cost test bed for their characters before turning them into films.

ALEX: How big do you think this line of business could be.

CHRIS: And in my mind it’s massive. Like in my mind it’s the thing that could turn Gimlet into a unicorn. And beyond because if you look at I mean there are many many many examples of multibillion dollar film and TV production companies and studios. There there aren’t any of the audio companies. And so I think you know there are precedents for this like you look at Marvel which was just a comic book company and you know it’s the same sort of model of originating characters and worlds and stories in a low-cost experimental format. Transitioning it to a higher investment higher return format.

ALEX: In other words, transitioning this character — me — in this world — the low-cost podcast environment you’re listening to right now — to this higher return format.

And it got me thinking, "How could charities massively scale up the income from their IP through licensing?" No immediate thoughts yet, but it's an interesting problem to consider.