The Four Color Media Monitor

After several years, the new Valiant's been bought out by a guy whose company wants to take advantage of their library for moviemaking:

The battle for cinematic universes has taken a new turn as DMG Entertainment, the entertainment company involved with movies such as Looper and Chappaquiddick, has acquired Valiant Entertainment, the comic publisher that boasts the third-largest universe of superhero characters.

DMG, run by founder and CEO Dan Mintz, already had a 57 percent stake in Valiant, but made a strategic move for whole ownership in order to make a concerted push into film, television and other media platforms.

You have to wonder if this was the real reason Valiant was revived - just so there'd be another wellspring for movies and television. And if that's their whole purpose, does that bode well for the zygote? Comics should be produced for encouraging people to read them, not for serving as filmmaking material.

Valiant was bought by video game company Acclaim Entertainment in the mid-'90s, but by the early 2000s Acclaim’s fortunes soured. The rights to the characters were eventually picked up by entrepreneurs Dinesh Shamdasani and Jason Kothari and a resurrected company began publishing again in 2012.

Mintz says he is not looking to make wholesale changes — “The plan is not to go in there and take apart what’s working,” he says — but some reverberations are already occurring. Shamdasani, who acted as CEO, is transitioning out of the company.

Seriously, he's walking away from the publisher he worked hard to reestablish? Honestly, I don't see how it does them much good, if Shamdasani's talented enough, to have him leave. Even so, from a sales perspective, they sold no better than most other publishers of their sort, so it's still not a true success, even if the stories in some of the books were written well.

The writers and artists who will stay to continue working the comics, without skipping a beat, Mintz insists, will now have their eyes on other platforms.

“You can expect more strong storytelling with a defined road to other platforms,” he says. “I’m also looking forward to bringing the writers close to the filmmaking process, which is something that is also important, and not keeping them siloed into the comic book area.”

Another clue this project was more for the sake of building up a source for moviemaking than for entertainment products serving as their own agency. IMO, that's ridiculous, and only compounds the impression they don't have faith in the source medium they began in. And what if any scriptwriting that's been done well begins to sink as they start gearing themselves more towards movies? If that does happen, what's the point of setting up a comics company to begin with?

Labels: indie publishers, msm propaganda, sales