Welcome to the new and improved Story Surveillance, your weekly intel briefing on the business of Hollywood and intriguing intellectual properties (IP) ripe for adaptation. We want to make SS more useful for us, but also for you. Please take a moment to let us know what's useful, what's not working, what you'd like more of and we'll make sure to do our best in future editions. As usual we’ve scoured the latest books, long-form journalism, podcasts, backlist gems, and international hits to uncover high-concept stories with cinematic potential, but we also added new sections about commissioning mandates and cultural vibes. Happy hunting!
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Contents (Issue #54)
🔮 Mandates & Market Trends (Powered by Mandate Wizard)
- Disney+ cuts back on Marvel/Star Wars, prioritizes tentpoles and Hulu integration. Disney International surges in Korea, India, and LatAm.
- Netflix leans harder into franchises and fast kill-metrics.
- Hulu bets on prestige limited series and provocative comedy.
- Paramount+ expands the Sheridan-verse and Showtime spin-offs.
- Peacock sticks to fun-first formats and nostalgic IP.
Subscribers get exclusive access to our internal Disney mandate files (see below).
💅 The Vibe
- Skibidi goes studio-scale, BuzzBallz enters the ironic brand economy, and dating coaches charge $10K to find husbands.
- Appstinence and dumbphones rise as status rebellion.
- Gen Z sells data for cash, and TikTokers expose cultural scams like oat milk and A.I. girlfriends.
📚 Books (Fresh IP, Just Announced)
- Cloned children hide dark secrets. A second moon looms. A woman must fall in love again post-memory wipe.
- A necromancer bride possesses her groom. Teen girls uncover bayou rituals. A thriller unfolds in a Japanese job trial.
- True crime nostalgia, attic hauntings, and cerebral literary ensemble pieces round out the list.
🎧 Podcasts (Narrative Audio)
- A Canadian bank robber’s jailbreak memoir becomes a noir prison epic.
- A surreal sci-fi western blends morality tracking with poetic world-building.
🌍 International IP (Foreign Language & Global Hits)
- A postwar literary mystery haunts the streets of Barcelona.
- A dead war photographer races the afterlife to leak images that could change Sri Lanka.
🔮 Trends
In addition to the below summary, subscribers can also access a special link to our deep dives. This week you'll have access to our comprehensive files on Disney US and Disney International.
🔵 Disney+: Back to Core IP & Quality Control
Sources: Bob Iger’s earnings call (Q1 2025); The Verge; TechCrunch; What’s On Disney Plus; The Walt Disney Company.
- Quality over quantity — fewer Marvel/Star Wars releases, more tentpole-focused rollouts. → Iger: "Quality has to trump quantity."
- Mature content growth via Hulu integration — Fox/FX-style general entertainment gaining ground. → Disney+ and Hulu single-app strategy launches in U.S. mid-2025.
- Hot IP remains dominant — Percy Jackson, Moana, Daredevil leading brand-aligned pushes.
- Star Wars franchise strategy focuses on continuity, fewer offshoots.
- Disney International
- Europe: curated prestige — Extraordinary (UK), The Good Mothers (Italy) highlight high-quality local storytelling.
- EMEA content capped at ~50 originals; focus on renewals and international acclaim. Disney Korea, Japan surge — Moving, A Shop for Killers, Tokyo Revengers dominate APAC metrics.
- APAC delivers 9 of 15 top global Disney+ hits. Hotstar in India pivots post-IPL — Bollywood thrillers like The Night Manager, talk shows (e.g. Koffee with Karan) gain importance.
- Disney exploring Jio merger for Hotstar unit.
- Latin America’s biopic & sports-doc run — Santa Evita, Nada, No Fue Mi Culpa resonate locally and travel globally.
- Disney+ and Star+ to merge into one app in 2024. MENA relies on Turkish dramas, cautious local originals — Umami leads Star-branded content.
- Turkish originals dubbed/subtitled for Arabic-speaking markets. Africa’s creative incubator — Iwájú and Kizazi Moto position Africa as long-term animation pipeline. → Pan-African strategy emphasizes global appeal, cultural specificity.
Mandates continues after the jump ...
Brazen Studios, our sister design agency, produces top quality film and television decks for production companies around the world. If you'd like to learn more, get in touch with Ryan Ho here. We also built a special tool trained on thousands of Hollywood decks to help you strategize your next project.
