IP Picks🔎: A 'Revenant' Survival Epic

➕ A 'Great Escape' WWII adventure and a 'Game of Thrones' fantasy procedural

GET WILD Leonardo DiCaprio braves the elements in the 2015 wilderness masterpiece, The Revenant. (20th Century Fox)

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As I suspected, the hot-out-of-the-gate success of Rebecca Yarros’ Onyx Storm now marks the moment when romantasy has officially crossed over into the mainstream. There's the record-breaking sales, of course, but the real tell is the NYT deciding it needed to explain the phenomena to its readers.

All of this raises the question: Where’s Hollywood when it comes to this recent trend? To help explain, our Ankler colleague, Entertainment Strategy Guy, published a guest column on his own substack from Kris Longfield, a partner at the insights and strategy firm, Fanthropology.

Longfield makes several smart points about the size of romance as a genre (about one-fifth of book sales are, broadly speaking, romance), as well as some observations about the connections between fanfiction and romantasy and the hybrid genre’s potential in Hollywood. The piece is worth reading, though I think she's a bit too bullish on that last point.

The connection between romantasy and fanfiction is a really smart insight that I’d even push a bit further. Longfield makes it sound like romantasy is a direct outgrowth of fanfic, much in the same way that Fifty Shades was. It isn’t. Still, the larger point is important. After all, so much early fanfic came from inventing romances from beloved properties, either as “shipping” (Harry and Hermione) or as slashfic (famously, Kirk and Spock). So, in a way, fanfic and romantasy derive from the same roots. However, romantasy is a distinct genre unto itself. More than anything, it’s about creating original stories and imagining whole new worlds.

Fanfic (and the social-media discourse shipping characters from popular shows) has changed the way that fans interact with their favorite properties. They feel a degree of ownership over the characters and want a more active relationship with these stories, whether that means snapping up collectibles or participating in cosplay. More than ever, “ownership” of popular material seems to be shared between fans and creators. The rise of BookTok only reinforces this point. In Today’s world, successfully exploiting IP requires owners of that IP to respect that partnership with fans.

When it comes to Hollywood’s role in all of this, Longfield argues that the movie business “needs to prioritize not only optioning romantasy, but getting it into production.” Pointing to the success of Twilight and Fifty Shades, she concludes that romantasy has the power to drive merchandising (and theme park admissions), mint new stars (see: Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart) and give independent authors and smaller publishing houses the opportunity to option material themselves.

For the most part, I agree with Longfield’s takeaways. But I would dial down the volume by about half. I think she underestimates the hurdles to bringing romantasy to the screen. These can be expensive properties to adapt because fantasy world-building doesn’t come cheap. As for the size of the genre’s audience beyond book fans, that’s less clear. There isn’t an established track record to gauge what audiences respond to. But IMHO, adaptations of the genre’s two biggest hits — A Court of Thorns and Roses and Empyrean — should be fast-tracked, stat.

I’d hedge my bets on some of the next-tier romantasy titles. I’d like to know more about the marketplace — e.g. box office and ratings — before committing a lot of money to any one option or moving ahead too quickly. This is where lumping romantasy and fanfic together feels like a mistake. Even with reimagined settings and characters, fanfic still builds on established IP. A lot of romantasy is way more original than that, which is a good thing. But it also makes predicting the future of these adaptations dicey.

Read the whole piece over at ESG and let me know what you think.

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On to this week’s picks, which include a pair of biopics and a procedural series with a big upside. The full lineup:

• A female-centered survival drama inspired by a true story

• A fantasy procedural that features a Holmes-and-Watson-esque duo investigating a murder that threatens the empire

• A cat-and-mouse thriller about a hacker on the run from the government

• A procedural set in the Midwest about a washed-up small-town hero accused of murder

• A fresh spin on a WWII combat drama