In this conversational episode, Sam Parr and his guest explore the massive financial potential of stage musical IP and its parallels to tech startup models. They discuss how iconic properties like Andrew Lloyd Webber’s catalog, Disney’s The Lion King, Lin‑Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, and The Book of Mormon generate billions in gross ticket sales, while creators earn sizable royalties (e.g., Hamilton’s ~7%). The dialogue moves to alternative financing—crowdfunding, NFT pre‑sales, and tiered ticket packages—as a way to raise production capital. Building on that, they propose a Y Combinator‑style accelerator for content: creators pitch shows, build sizzle reels in three months, and demo‑day to streaming platforms that collectively spend $6 billion annually on new content. Real‑world examples of massive content deals are cited: South Park’s $900 million, Shonda Rhimes’ multi‑hundred‑million Netflix deal, Reese Witherspoon’s production company sale near $1 billion, and Hasan Minhaj’s new production company. The conversation frames musical theater and broader IP creation as a high‑margin, scalable business comparable to software startups, and Sam promises deeper research into Broadway economics in future episodes.
Chapters
Dude, there's this guy. People are gonna laugh at me because I don't know— or if you know who this is, is it Andrew Lloyd Webber? I forget who it— I forget the guy's name.
Is that the Phantom of the Opera guy?
Yes.
School of Rock, Phantom of the Opera, and Evita, which are all big hits that I've heard of. And then I've never heard of Jesus Christ Superstar, but yeah, that's apparently like done in the '70s.
Yeah, he, uh, he's a billionaire.
Yeah, so, so I looked up— so when I thought of that, play model, I was like, is the play— is the play business a good business? It could be, and I think it can be. So the top— the top IP definitely accrues like a shit ton of value. Like I said, if you can go look at like Lion King has grossed like $2 point something billion. That's the number one stage play.
What's number 2 and 3?
Hamilton is like getting up there. It's like— it's like number 2 or 3 now, but it's like very new, so it'll— it'll surpass Lion King if it just keeps going. There's like Phantom of the Opera, there's Mamma Mia, there's like— so you take the top 10 and they're all doing like hundreds of millions in gross sales. Okay, now you don't get to keep the gross sales, but I think you could do this in a way that works. So like the guy who created Hamilton, Lin-Manuel, whatever his name is.
Yeah, but did the, uh, did the author get paid too on that one?
So he gets— so this guy Lin, who's the creator of it, he has like a 7% royalty or something like that. Wow. So he's made like tens of millions of dollars off of the profits. They actually crowdfunded the thing. Uh, so what they did, I don't have the full story in front of me because I'm just trying to say this off the top of my head from memory, but I think what they did was to raise the money to create the thing, they had like a bunch of patrons basically chip in money and they all get to keep a profit share after a certain amount of money had been recouped. And so that investment has been paid over like 10 times. So if, again, if I was Hasan Minhaj, I'd be like, hmm, There's Web3 shit going on. Interesting. A lot of people flush with cash buying into shit. Okay, cool. Digital tickets, NFTs. Okay, what can I do with this? And I would basically raise $10 million through an NFT presale of the show and in different tiers. Like, you know, some of the tickets have backstage passes attached to them, some of them don't, whatever. That's interesting. And I would just let people buy, buy this. I'd raise $10 million. I'd use the $10 million to go into a bunker. To create whatever the hell Hamilton for Black people is, and then I would—
Hamilton for brown people, for Indians.
Oh yeah, sorry, not Black people, brown people. So then I would take that show on the road and I would just try to— I would be like, yeah, I know it's hard, but like being a successful stand-up comedian was also like a 0.1% success rate or whatever, you know, to get to where he's at. So like, yeah, you want to get to the 0.1% success rate, but this time with a superior business model that doesn't require your face on the stage saying the jokes.
Yeah, I think that's sick. I think that's a, that's a great idea. I think that actually, that's wonderful. I think, and that could be incredibly creative, creatively fulfilling.
I wish I had said it on the spot. It's like one of those when you're in an argument and then like later you're in the car, fuck, I should have said that. That's what happened to me. But luckily we were still hanging out at that moment, so I was able to tell him, you know, then this is a cool idea.
I think in the next couple episodes what I'm gonna do is I'm actually gonna bring in, I'm gonna do some research on the Broadway business or like I don't know, theater, I guess. What do you call it? Theater? Yeah, it's actually an interesting idea. I was always curious because American Idiot, basically they did this. So Billie Joe Armstrong wrote— Green Day wrote American Idiot, the album, the song. They turned it into a rock musical, right? You didn't have to be there. They didn't have to be there, you know, exactly. And they got paid a lot from Book of Mormon.
Let me see how much Book of Mormon has made. Mormon revenue. $500 million has been the gross ticket sales of Book of Mormon. And then if you did something like a Hamilton or like a Lion King or whatever, you could take that same IP, those characters, you have merch, you have like other— that IP is— key is you got to own the IP. And, you know, so I think, you know, when Book of Mormon launched, it says it was bringing in $19 million per month. So like, I don't know what South Park generated lifetime, but like, I bet it's kind of like on par with that. Or, you know, I guess South Park's probably a bigger success.
Yeah.
Oh wow, South Park. Okay, just in 20— I didn't know this happened actually. Looks like a couple months ago the South Park creators signed a $900 million deal for more episodes for, for 6 years with ViacomCBS. That's insane. I didn't know that.
That's actually amazing. That's amazing.
Right now is the best time ever to be a, like, a production company or an IP holder. And we said this a long time ago, remember I said someone needs to— there's all these platforms now. You got, at the time it was Netflix, Amazon Prime, and then I said Disney+ was gonna come out. It hadn't come out yet. And then there was like, you know, there's Hulu, there's all these different platforms. Apple TV+ came out. They all want original content. They're all hungry for content, and they are betting billions of dollars on uh, budgeting every single year to buy content. I think Netflix or Amazon or something like, they're paying like $6 billion per year for content, uh, for new content production. And so it is the best time ever to be a seller of content. And at the time we had said somebody should create YC for content, basically the way that Y Combinator helped produce software startups. And it just said, hey, 2 engineers, okay, you're 21 years old, you graduated from Stanford. All right, come here. This is essentially like a business school, but you're gonna create a little business and You know, maybe you can sell to Facebook or Google, or you'll end up becoming the next Airbnb. You'll go public. I think the same thing with the content where you come in as two kind of like creatives. You have a pitch for an idea of a show you want to create. Um, you have 3 months to basically create the sizzle reel or the pilot or whatever. And then there's a demo day with a bunch of buyers from all the big streaming platforms and they just buy options on your shit. And, um, I just think that's a beautiful— I still think that's a great business idea. And it's only been proven when South Park signs a $900 million deal with CBS. Shonda Rhimes, I think, signed, signed a couple hundred million dollar deal with Netflix to produce 6 shows. Reese Witherspoon sold her production company, which didn't even have that, like, for like a billion, for like a billion dollars. Like, this is, you know, this is tech startup money that's being sold for TV content, which is amazing. So, you know, that's a—
that's way more fun than building software.
Way more, way cooler, way cooler than that. And I think today Hasan Minhaj also announced his production. He created a production company today, announced it, like 100— I think it's called 186K Productions or something like that, which is smart. Again, like, once you see Reese Witherspoon and other people's production companies selling— and we had Rob Dyrdek on, I think he said he sold his production company for 200-something million.
He said that he— I think he said he's walking away with 100, him personally.
Yeah, so like, I think, you know, at least, let's say at least $100 million, probably closer to $200 million. He sold his production company, which basically just produced shows for MTV. That's a great business to be in, and I think it's only going to get better for like this kind of 5-year period.
