Exclusive: Hollywood’s ‘fear of fandom’ shifting as franchises evolve & take centre stage

Sweet Home

Hollywood is increasingly listening to fans of shows to secure hits, while the notion of single medium franchises is unlikely to survive, according to the president of Wattpad Webtoon Studios.

Aron Levitz, appearing at SeriesFest in Denver, told TBI that the “shift” of working with fandom when creating shows had proven success with the likes of Prime Video film Perfect Addiction and Netflix’s Sweet Home, which are based on Wattpad and Webtoon IP, respectively.

Aron Levitz

The Naver-owned company has been ramping up over the past year, bringing former Fox and AMC exec David Madden onboard as its head of global entertainment and expanding a slate that now has around 100 shows in development or production.

Levitz said that embracing fandom is a “massive change in terms of how Hollywood has always thought,” where previously “a sole human would do all the work and create genius. That still happens with IP, there is creator behind it, but now you can create with the fandom instead of waiting for it to turn up.”

Levitz said adaptations of IP from Webtoon and Wattpad – the latter acquired by Naver in 2021 for $600m – such as Tower Of God on Crunchyroll were highlighting how fandom was beginning to be embraced by execs in Hollywood, which had previously been “so used to listening to itself.”

.He added: “No longer is there fear of fandom and listening to it, or listening to the audience and looking at the data. We’ve translated the ones and zeros on a screen to driving themes, we explain why someone who comes to the universe will fall in love with a show and that is taking away the fear from the creative execs.

“We can do that and in the same way de-risk a show because there are fans behind it that will watch it. We have seen a massive shift in the last four years driven by successes we’ve seen globally.”

Levitz added that barriers between mediums would also collapse, with IP travelling freely across games, books, comics, merchandise, TV, podcasts and film.

“You’ll see buzz and sizzle on one-offs here and there, but increasingly the term franchise no longer means a [show on a] single platform. You used to be able to have a book franchise or a movie franchise, that feels very confining to me.

“I know that a franchise that starts on our platform needs to grow within an ecosytem and the fandom loves it. That fandom may start on our platform but then it might become Tower Of God on Crunchyroll.

“It will be harder and harder to call something a franchise if it was just starting from one point. That definition of franchise will really change over the next five to ten years and those defining platforms where the IP is first created will now start to be places like Wattpadd or Webtoon, which are uniquely set up to fulfil the next 100 years of franchises instead of going and buying whatever was the last 100 years and repeating it and repeating it.”