Broadway Unlocked Ventures

The library-building approach—where studios indefinitely own and exploit creative works—belongs to the pre-digital era. It's a business model designed for scarcity, not abundance.

ATG Entertainment, which has a long-term lease on the Lyric, has collected more than $34 million in rent on Broadway from Cursed Child. In the year ending in February 2025, rent consumed nearly 11% of box office sales. To be sure, ATG has its own real estate expenses. In 2013, it paid $64 million for the lease to the Lyric, and later spent millions more on Cursed Child renovations.

"Our goal is to build the best turnkey media operation in venture: a single place where founders acquire the legitimacy, taste, brand-building, expertise, and momentum they need to win the narrative battle online."

The traditional model is: make a thing, sell a few big licenses, call it a day. Now it's: make a thing, sell what you can up front, then go wide—AVOD, FAST, TVOD, SVOD, and social video; so the audience can actually find it.

The economic center of gravity has shifted from courting corporate buyers to serving consumer demand at scale.

The biggest startup opportunities often live in the grey. Bill Gurley calls it regulatory friction — rules built to protect incumbents, not consumers…Uber and Airbnb played in the grey — breaking laws around safety and licensing, but creating so much consumer love that regulation eventually bent to them. Now we’re seeing similar patterns in: