Franchises don’t get better than The Walking Dead. It has enormous hits on everything from comic books to TV shows to games.

The games alone have generated more than $1 billion in revenues, and the Netlix show drew 1.3 billion viewing hours in 2023, according to a report by Owl & Co. And during that year it was the third-most watched TV series — 13 years after the TV show launched.

Hernan Lopez, founder of Owl & Co., said in an interview with GamesBeat that The Walking Dead, which debuted as a comic book by 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 set up a “writer’s room,” supervised by Kirkman, to figure out the different paths for the entertainment property to go. And during the past couple of decades, Kirkman noted in our 2023 interview, that gaming movies and TV shows finally turned out to be good because the creators were gamers themselves. In parallel, The Walking Dead has been a hit across many platforms. And Skybound raised funding in 2022 to double down on its strategy.

Lopez doesn’t have 2024 numbers yet but he believes the success continued.

“There’s never been a show quite like it,” Lopez said.

The Walking Dead franchise had more than 330 episodes across seven live-action TV series, and it continues to break records for Netflix as new generations of viewers discover it. The engagement alone is worth $83 million a year to Netflix, considering its average cost-per-viewing hour, 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 more than $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 U.S. but it’s also No. 1 in 150 countries around the world,” said David Alpert, CEO of Skybound, in an interview with GamesBeat. “It’s a top three show globally right now on Netflix. That kind of blew my mind.”

Alpert noted that his daughter was born the same year the show started. Now she’s old enough to watch it with her friends on Netflix.

“There’s an entire generation that has grown up hearing about this show and hearing about the success and having read the comics and play the games and bought the merch. They’ve seen that all done by their older siblings and their parents,” Alpert said. “People are rediscovering it. This whole generation is finding this massive 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 accomplish 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 issues to date for the comics). And the Telltale game series continues to be a massive seller. It shows in general that zombies are always fertile ground for video games, but to have the IP last so long means its universe and experiences are like none 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 did The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners — a VR, console and PC title. Telltale did the narrative-based The Walking Dead game series. Each game became a hit in its respective category.

But when Telltale shut down (later to be reborn), Skybound repurchased the narrative game series and published it as a catalog title. Lopez said the staying power of the show has been amazing.

“Their retention rate from episode and from season to season is way above what any other show on Netflix,” Lopez said. “The Walking Dead is the No. 1 franchise in entertainment for shows that are not aimed at kids and created entirely this century.”

Yet while it’s printing money, Skybound has been taking a lot of risks.

“A lot of other exploitations or commercializations of the world are basically the same thing over and over again,” Alpert said. “We actually have a universe that’s filled with a rule set and characters, but there’s an entire opportunity to tell new stories.”

Characters from the show are popular, but so are those like Clementine from the Telltale game. Many of them are created in a writer’s room with a common architect.

“That’s all Robert Kirkman,” Alpert said. “He’s the genius who sort of figures out how to approach it, and he’ll architect it” so there are intersections with other parts of the franchise.”

He added, “[It all] exists in the same universe. It roots you and grounds you inside of The Walking Dead universe, but doesn’t limit you to only seeing the characters that we see in the comics. It gives you a chance to find your own way in what it does best, and I think that’s been one of the reasons why we’ve had such success.”

While the success is amazing, it creates a problem that is 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 can’t start a second viable business. They have such high expectations for the new business that it can never live up to the first success.

Alpert, however, points out that the company continues to invest in comic books. Focused on telling new stories, these comics can test new ideas and become TV shows, movies or games. Eventually they can also generate a lot of retail merchandise sales. The fountain for much of it is Kirkman, but the company also engages with other creators as well as a kind of third-party publisher for IP.

“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 zombie movie ends,” Alpert said. “How do they live in a world where the zombies are? Your world has been rocked. What do you do the next day”

The company is starting to invest more in Invincible, which started at the same time that The Walking Dead appeared. That story about superheroes focused on family relations, 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 every teen can relate to and every every adult can relate to because they’ve gone 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 conscious for, you know, for two plus decades. And what’s fun is that a lot of people are just discovering Invincible now.”

He said those worlds that Skybound has are ripe 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, like Star Trek, Star Wars, Harry Potter and James Bond. At different points in their history, they were either worth emulating or were cautionary tales. With Harry Potter, both kids and parents can enjoy the narratives. 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 that come out. Any new game has to compete with those in its year of release, but it also has to compete with all the past releases that are still popular too. The same goes for TV 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 age of plenty where distribution is overwhelming. There’s distribution all over the place.”

One lesson is that the franchises that exist already will continue to have relevance in the current entertainment diet of people.

“It’s like physics, where something in motion is going to continue to stay in motion,” he said. “People know about them and discovery is the biggest challenge for any content that we have out there.”

As for the state of the industry, the game industry and Hollywood alike have had tough years. They’ve had tensions like strikes around AI. There are still big hits and still winners and losers.

As for navigating new trends like AI, Alpert thinks that respecting IP is critical to whether it will be accepted or not. Companies have to embrace AI the right way.

“We’re going to continue to expand the world of The Walking Dead. We’re going to find new places to expand the stories. I don’t have a specific announcement yet, but I think we are sort of examining what is the best medium. What is the best genre to sort of really do something new with The Walking Dead? We can take all this newfound excitement and engagement. How do we push it forward? We don’t want to just do the same old thing.”

Disclosure: I have family working for Skybound.