The next big movie franchise/theme park/toy line will likely come from games. Players are spending thousands of hours interacting with game characters. Many developers are moving away from a publisher-led financing model to a VC model that enables them to maintain ownership over their IP.

The video game world was awash with money in the early 2000s. New investors had flooded the market, chasing exponentially profitable blockbusters made by non-unionized hobbyists working with budgets less than the cost of craft services for a Harry Potter movie—take Grand Theft Auto III (2001), made for 5 million USD, which grossed over 250 million... See more