IP Picks🔎: A Hit Author's Literary Estate Sale
âž• a heist romp, a slasher flick and a twisty locked-room mystery
Welcome to The Optionist! I have something unique today: An entire catalog up for grabs. The estate of the late Wilbur Smith is selling the IP rights to everything he’s written, including the Ballantyne and Courtney series about colonial settlers in Southern Africa, the Hector Cross spy novels and another series set in Ancient Egypt. Smith has been a bestselling novelist since the 1960s (a posthumous novel he co-wrote is on the bestseller list in the U.K. right now), and his total sales exceed 140 million copies globally. But his writing might seem dated to modern eyes, something that can become more pronounced when it’s translated on screen. So this is a big opportunity, but not one without complications. You can read the whole entry below.
Catalog sales like this have become a hot thing of late. Recall that Netflix paid a reported $600 million to acquire Roald Dahl’s literary estate (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach) in 2021; a few years before that, Acorn Media picked up the Agatha Christie estate. In a world where pre-tested IP with high brand recognition is favored, literary estates, when they become available, look increasingly attractive to studios and streamers.
On to this week’s picks, which feature something for everyone, from a slasher story to a rom-com heist. The lineup:
A YA slasher/horror romp set during a high-school Halloween party at a mansion featuring a killer clown.
A mystery/thriller set in Iowa that teams a scientist and a psychic together to solve the possibly connected disappearances of the scientist’s husband and a young woman.
A rom-com heist tale about a slacker twenty-something who assembles a team to re-steal a valuable necklace to clear her bestie of the crime.
A locked-room mystery set in an exclusive old money club in upstate New York.
An adventure thriller about a real-life around-the-world sailing race which amateurs can join, but risk their lives while doing so.
