Previously, I wrote about six summer reads begging to be developed. I excerpted books about Casey Wasserman’s role in the L.A. fires recovery, Arsenio Hall’s late-night challenges and Coppola & Lucas’ ill-fated ’70s studio. Subscribe to The Optionist, my weekly list of available IP.
The literary estates of Tennessee Williams and Paddy Chayefsky now sit inside the portfolio of a Connecticut investment firm called Viking Global. They got there the way song catalogs have been trading hands for 20 years: A well-capitalized buyer decided the rights to a dead artist’s work are an income stream that could be modeled, priced and improved.
The buyer was International Literary Properties (ILP), which launched in 2019 and is now fully funded by Viking. ILP has assembled a stable that runs from Langston Hughes to Evelyn Waugh to children’s author Ellen Raskin.
In January it borrowed $100 million from Fifth Third Bank to buy more. Michael Barra, ILP’s new CEO, says the loan signals that his company and the investments it makes have arrived: “You know an asset class is maturing when a bank will offer you bank debt.” A regulated commercial bank lending against literary royalties means a conservative lender now treats dead writers’ royalties as dependable enough income to lend against.
Now ILP has company. Atticus Works, founded this summer by investor and author Richard Hurowitz, launched with $100 million from Primary Wave, the private equity-backed music publisher that helped invent the catalog-buying business with early deals for Hall & Oates, Smokey Robinson, Kurt Cobain and Def Leppard.
ILP declined to discuss terms of its acquisitions, including what it paid. But big corporations have made a handful of high-profile literary estate deals in the past decade. Netflix bought the Roald Dahl estate in 2021 for a reported $700 million, and Swedish gaming company Embracer paid nearly $400 million for a piece of J.R.R. Tolkien rights. What’s new is the money behind ILP and Atticus: private equity, buying for the returns rather than the IP.
Atticus has not yet announced any acquisitions, but Hurowitz says his phone has already rung with inquiries from a well-known European genre writer and a couple of iconic American authors who reached out directly. What Atticus does have is a thesis and a checkbook, which for now is enough to move prices. While Atticus isn’t revealing what kind of return it’s promising its backers, the company sees any acquisition as something it would hold onto for years, not a quick flip.
Typically, estates and heirs could sit on a title for decades, and plenty did.
Now, for Hollywood, the move by Wall Street into literary rights changes the identity — and potentially the behavior — of the people controlling an important supply of source material. The role of agents certainly shifts in this new ecosystem, and studios increasingly may find themselves across the table from investment-backed companies with return targets, growth mandates and every incentive to get dormant IP working again.
That could mean more forgotten books and stories getting pitched, packaged and adapted — but also higher prices, less flexibility and a very different kind of rights holder. For authors and estates, it raises a newly urgent question: Is this the moment to cash out? For investors: Is there still enough overlooked value in the backlist to make the bet pay off? And for Hollywood: What happens when literary IP starts trading like an asset class?
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