Animation Boom: What’s Driving Bigger Box Office, Better Movies, Richer Deals
UTA agent Strawn Dixon says the format is grabbing bigger share every year, and every pact he inks for clients now is 'an improvement on the previous'
I cover agents, lawyers and top dealmakers for paid subscribers. I wrote about who’s scoring big feature film deals now, broke down Hollywood’s coming mid-market M&A frenzy and interviewed WME’s indie film co-head Deborah McIntosh.
Strawn Dixon’s origin story isn’t exactly a John Hughes movie, but set it a suburb or two further up the North Shore, maybe add some fireworks, and it’s pretty close.
Dixon’s path to becoming an animation agent at UTA, which he joined as an intern back in 2018, started with making home videos with his younger brothers in Lake Forest, Ill. “I have a fun memory of recreating the Mission: Impossible title sequence with them by filming sparklers in the dark garage of our childhood home,” he recalls.
His parents met and lived in L.A. for nearly a decade, and his aunt and uncle were USC alums who ensured he was decked out in Trojans football gear from birth. So, on his first day of high school, Dixon boldly informed his guidance counselor that he intended to pursue his passion for film at USC’s highly-competitive School of Cinematic Arts — and he made it happen, “despite thinking a sparkler-filled garage was peak cinema,” he says with a laugh.
Now, the 29-year-old motion picture literary agent has a front row seat to what “peak cinema” actually looks like, representing some of the top talent in animation including Maggie Kang (KPop Demon Hunters, Netflix’s biggest film ever), David G. Derrick Jr. (Moana 2, which scored $1.059 billion at the global box office in 2024), Adam Elliott (Memoir of a Snail, an animated feature Oscar nominee this year) and Bad Guys 2 directors Pierre Perifel and JP Sans (whose sequel has so far grossed $230 million worldwide).
“Last year was a record year for animation in the box office, both globally and domestically, and animation is going to be a major priority for the studios because of that success,” Dixon tells me. “Nearly a third of the global box office last year was animated, which is just incredible.”
Just about every element of the animation ecosystem is different from its live action counterpart — including the dealmaking. Because animated features can often take five-plus years to make, director deals function like overalls in the live action world, with the filmmaker(s) being paid annually over the course of development and production.
And there’s really no such thing as an overnight success. The helmers of the biggest animation franchises in the world started their careers as storyboard artists or character designers and worked their way up — over the course of a decade or longer — before getting a shot, which usually meant co-directing alongside someone more seasoned. This arc fostered an environment where creatives made a home at a studio and stayed there, but Dixon says that’s changing, and it’s reshaping the dynamics of the industry.
In our conversation, Dixon breaks down how animation is rewriting the rules for filmmakers and studios alike — including:
The boom: How a record 2024 box office made animation every studio’s top priority
The shift: Why top filmmakers are jumping around studios — and how that’s driving better movies and better deals
The stakes: How AI is reshaping conversations around artist protection and creative ownership
Big myth: Why big-name attachments can actually hurt an animation pitch
Leverage point: The creative deal point filmmakers care about as much as their paycheck
Next big thing: The genre every studio wants right now
Must list: 3 things that give an original feature franchise potential (and yes, KPop Demon Hunters has them all)