Sony Pictures Television chair Keith Le Goy is looking to anime and video games as the next major bastions of IP-driven screen content, he said at Mipcom on Monday.
Speaking with Variety co-editor-in-chief Cynthia Littleton, Le Goy cited anime and video games as particular areas of interest for Sony. “One of the things that I think is increasingly becoming clear, which is that if some of the IP that drove entertainment in the last twenty to twenty-five years was U.S. comic book IP — Marvel, DC, they’re not going away, but they don’t necessarily have the absolute pole position prominence that they had before — what is going to drive the next wave of IP is anime and is video games,” he told the audience of TV executives in Cannes.
Sony snapped up anime streaming service Crunchyroll from AT&T in 2021, merging it with Funimation. It also owns PlayStation. “Sony is uniquely well positioned,” Le Goy acknowledged, adding that the company’s Japanese parent is “1000%” interested in further acquisitions. “There will be opportunities for us to pursue and we will pursue them,” the chair said, citing sister company Sony Music as an example of “being very aggressive in buying music catalogs and publishing companies and really expanding its kind of footprint.”
“IP is one of those absolutely critical things to have,” LeGoy acknowledged.
The TV exec pointed to “Demon Slayer” as a property that had performed even beyond what the company had anticipated. “The last seasons of the show had been one of the top or top two performing shows on Crunchyroll, so we knew we had something,” Le Goy said, but added they still had not expected the film to be the smash hit success it turned out to be.
“As we saw it rolling out across from Japan and across Southeast Asia, you could see that this was really building and building and building. Did we know that it was going to be as powerful as that? No, but you know, look two of the top five movies this year at the global box office. One is a game-oriented movie, which is ‘Minecraft,’ and the other one is ‘Demon Slayer.’ And so that, again, kind of just shows the power now of video games and anime and music is probably another incredibly important source of IP that is really engaging and inspiring audiences, and again, puts us in a very privileged position because of the relationships we have with those creators.”
Another theme Le Goy touched on during the panel, which is fast emerging as a motto of this year’s market, is aggregation as opposed to cannibalization. Part of that is loosening up streamers’ bids for lengthy contract terms on series, potentially in exchange for less money. “One of the conversations we’re having with a lot of those streamers is, do you really need to hold on to the rights for 10 years after the last season? You can pay us a little less,” said Le Goy. “And by the way, you probably now know the consumption curve on a lot of those shows, that you’re really not giving up as much value as you might have once feared, but that there can be incredible value for the show, for you and for us in having the opportunity to take those shows and to make them more widely available to other third parties. And you know, we’re starting to see some interesting sort of opportunity in that regard.”
“We’re in a world now where, you know, people used to worry about cannibalization, right? If this is on too many places, it’s going to cannibalize my primary viewership over here. Because of the fragmentation that we’ve experienced in the media landscape it’s not about cannibalization anymore. It’s actually about aggregation.”
Le Goy pointed to the first few seasons of “Breaking Bad” being available in the early days of Netflix, which created a new fanbase for the audience who then went to AMC for the latest episodes. “It became this incredible virtuous circle of audiences discovering the show, loving the show, talking about the show, that lifted every partner associated with it,” he said. “And obviously was pretty good for the show too.”
