Sony to acquire 'Peanuts' for $457 million.
 

Charlie Brown and all of the characters you know and love have been acquired by Sony for $457 million. I hope Sony does great things with them because this is a franchise I've loved since I was 3 years old.

https://variety.com/2025/film/news/s...al-1236612363/

When was the las time Peanuts was relevant?
At this point it's just a character you license to put on merchandise like cups and whatnot. It has 0 cultural impact and no one under 30 cares about the characters. Even for 90s kids the franchise was only relevant for its holiday specials.

Peanuts for 457 million... yet TMNT sold to Viacom for 62 million. That's crazy.

Well we've discussed this before but Laird sold TMNT for way less than he should've. Power Rangers sold for more like 2 years later and that's only because Disney wanted to get rid of it quickly. Also in the current age companies value legacy IP much more than they used to in the 2000s.

With that context licensing gives a lot of money, I think garfield makes around a billion dollars a year through licensing. So rights holders likely get around 3% so Garfield would make around 30 million per year to its rights owners. I would guess Peanuts is doing around those same numbers but don't know perhaps they do much more Snoopy is everywhere in merchandise. It still feels like they overpaid but those numbers don't come out of thin air, maybe they're making double of what garfield does.

It's even more crazy: Sony paid 457 million for only 41% of Peanuts.

I guess never underestimate Sony's never-ending series of stupid choices.

This is so random. And 457 million, really? Are Peanuts really worth that much in 2025/2026?

I'm surprised Disney didn't get their filthy hands on Peanuts, anyway.

I know nowadays nothing is a just a character or a story. It's either an all-out franchise or it isn't.

I never thought I'd see the day where Peanuts was considered a franchise, and worth 457 million no less.

I would've thought, if anything, it would be worth pennies on the dollar at this point.

eh, I'm guessing it's because even now the characters, especially Snoopy, are still super marketable when it comes to merch, especially in other countries. Snoopy is so big in Japan some people don't even know he's an American creation. So I guess it's more about the merch than actual shows or cartoons or whatever.

Even when I was a kid I thought Peanuts was old as hell or lame, and this was the early 90's. I can't imagine what kids in the 2020's care about Peanuts, they probably have no idea it exists.

Right? I had this same feeling. I wouldn't mind watching it much because back then there wasn't like tons of options to watch at certain times, but it DID feel very dated and old even then.

I mean, it has/had a comic strip and had a cartoon series at least and lots of merchandise. So it's not like it's just a mere popular newspaper comic strip like Zits or Foxtrot are/were.

Yeah I did have on VHS tape that episode where they have student council elections, though lol. That one was fun. But I remember watching reruns of the cartoon series on cable when I was an older kid and it was fine for what it was but it wasn't a personal favourite of mine.

My mother used to tell me that Peanuts actually clicked more with adults than it did with kids, which I always found it hard to believe. I think this is one of those cases of a generational disconnect.

Peanuts isn't so big here in the U.S. anymore, but selling Snoopy's face on lunchboxes and toys takes in a billion dollars annually from international sales. The company calls itself Peanuts Worldwide in acknowledgement of this. An equivalent might be Hello Kitty, a brand which Japan tired of long ago but is still very popular across the world.

My favorite Peanuts years are the early ones, 1950-55. I've never found the running gags Schulz began using afterwards to be very funny.