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Stephen King has spent fifty years telling us that the most dangerous things in the world are the ones lurking in small American towns. It turns out the most lucrative ones are too. A new analysis by Parrot Analytics, published by TheWrap on 6 November, estimates that King adaptations have brought in $1.07 billion in global subscriber revenue for the major streamers since 2020. Somewhere in Maine, a man who still writes his first drafts longhand has become a streaming platform’s favourite business model.
HBO Max has done best out of it, with about $407 million, followed by Netflix on $247 million and Prime Video on $137 million. Prime Video’s share is helped along by the MGM+ originals Chapelwaite and The Institute. The single biggest earner is HBO’s IT: Welcome to Derry, which Parrot puts at $202 million as of the second quarter of this year. Pennywise has always known exactly what he was doing with those balloons. The Outsider has made more than $60 million for HBO Max, and King films have driven more than 1.3 million HBO Max sign-ups since 2020.
Netflix offers the most curious detail. Its top King earner is Stand by Me, on more than $30 million, and none of its ten most lucrative King titles was released after 2019. So the world’s largest streamer is making its King money from a 1986 film about four boys walking along a railway line to look at a dead body. Make of that what you will about the nation’s viewing habits. It also fits the audience figures. Nearly 40 per cent of King viewers are Gen X or older, which may explain why so many of us can still recite the leech scene. The youngest audiences belong to Prime Video’s new Carrie series and to Welcome to Derry, so the pig’s blood and the clown are recruiting a new generation.
Two caveats are worth spelling out before anybody ties a red balloon to their share portfolio. These are modelled estimates from Parrot’s “Streaming Economics” model, not revenue reported by the platforms, which keep those figures locked in a cellar somewhere near Castle Rock. The article was also written by a Parrot Analytics employee for TheWrap’s subscriber section. That doesn’t make the numbers wrong. It just means they are an informed guess dressed in a suit.
The timing is good for MGM+, which launched the second season of The Institute on 8 November. The escaped children of King’s 2019 novel are now fighting back. Ben Barnes, Mary Louise Parker and Joe Freeman return, and Alfie Allen joins as Nolan Reeves, a tech billionaire who funds the Institute. As villains go, a tech billionaire funding sinister experiments on children feels less like horror these days and more like a business story.
The bigger picture is that King has written more than sixty novels and several hundred short stories, and the streamers have barely started on them. Expect many more adaptations. King has outlasted video nasties, the paperback horror boom and Kubrick’s version of The Shining. A streaming gold rush is unlikely to trouble him much.
Source: TheWrap / Parrot Analytics.
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