Iconic Arts raises $3.1M to create original properties for games and Hollywood

Iconic Arts, a new Los Angeles transmedia entertainment studio, has raised $3.1 million to create original properties for games and Hollywood. And it will prototype its ideas in the market using games for quick-and-easy platforms like Roblox.

The company was started by blockchain, gaming and Hollywood veterans Steven Haddadian, Alec Roth, Matthew Medney, Mo Yazdani and Jack Sheehan.

(Hollywood and games is one of our themes at our GamesBeat Summit 2024 event; get 25% off with this code: gbs24dean25).

In an interview with GamesBeat, Haddadian said the company has a $20 million pre-seed valuation and it has offices in Los Angeles and Tokyo. The team has nine people.

The new company has support from Hollywood, gaming, and technology luminaries such as Oscar-winning screenwriter Eric Roth, Grammy-winning artist and founder of FYI.ai, Will.i.am and industry titans Chris Heatherly (The Walt Disney Company, NBCUniversal), Mark Caplan (Sony Pictures Entertainment), and Motoki Tani (Animoca Brands KK, Millennium, JP Morgan).

AI expert and CTIO of JPL NASA, Chris Mattmann, immersive media pioneer, Brian Selzer and legal AI attorney, Charles Lew also join the distinguished advisory board.

Origins

The team came together in January 2023.

Haddadian said, “It was based on really a thesis that we developed after I went to pretty much all the film studios, the game studios, the toy studios, and we all ask them the same question. Where is the original IP? The fresh stories, those like really fresh characters and adventures?”

He added, “I go back to the days of that golden era of cinema. Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones. Now, back to the future, what happened? Where did those original characters go? Why did they stop? And it was crazy because they all said the same thing.”

They said they couldn’t do original IP because it was too expensive. It costs millions to create something like 16 drafts of a pilot for a TV series, he said. It also costs a lot to make a triple-A game or even a mobile game, taking it into the market for testing.

The other thing was that it was so risky, Haddadian said. He went to so many different executives who once managed 30 titles on their slate of games. Now there are perhaps four, and they’are all adaptations and sequels.

“We wanted to create a company, an entertainment company that can eliminate these two problems, and an industry that we really love,” Haddadian said. “We want to approach entertainment, not as a standalone format, such as a game, or a film or TV show. We’re a transmedia IP company. Our main model is developing actual transmedia IP, de-risking through proprietary market testing and validation.”

The company has built some tools to enable it to do that.

“Once we have created community and understood what works with the game and a film and a TV show, and merchandising, then we go to the secondary round and find the right partners to actually make this,” Haddadian said. “This eliminates the whole idea of development hell and titles getting shelved.”

The old way doesn’t work

Iconic Arts has a way to test these ideas in the market. It can create new IP and put it onto user-generated content platforms Roblox, Fortnite, YouTube, TikTok and more.

“Through this, we can connect the community to different transmedia experiences early on in our whole modeling as we bring market testing and validation earlier on in the cycle for all these things — gaming film, television and merchandising,” he said.

Iconic Arts wants to go and buy that kind of script from the big studio — perhaps for pennies on the dollar — and try to develop a community around it. Haddadian noted his former company, Star Atlas, sold $250 million worth of in-game assets without having a game out yet. It was a Web3 title that generated a lot of excitement around its original IP.

Carroll said in an interview, “Historically, Hollywood has really done everything in a vacuum. They have NDAs, and you have everything secret. They have secret sets and different endings so that people can’t leak it. But I think what we are trying to bring into that Hollywood model is really what we’ve learned in gaming is that early access, community building, bringing people into the process, having that concept and showing them what this IP could be, get them involved, get them really emotionally attached, let them play a little mini game, let them watch YouTube’s behind the scenes stuff.”

He added, “The model has really changed very much and we’re looking to bring that Silicon Valley gaming mentality that I’ve been doing for a long time and a lot of the team has been doing to Hollywood and really combine the two into this transmedia experience not just about gaming or about movies, but bringing it all together.”

The better way

Iconic Arts can spend a lot less money on its prototypes and get them into game worlds. It can build worlds in a procedural way, or generate a lot of art using the lateset AI tools.

“It creates this democratization of storytelling of original IP market and it tests it,” Haddadian said. “And what’s beautiful about these UGC platforms is it fits into our thesis of transmedia. We can test with gaming, we can test with content, and we can test the merchandising.”

He said the team has been developing its own library of original IP using its creative writers and filmmakers. And it’s talking with big consumer brands about using that IP. Those brands could be paired with that IP to see if it will resonate with fans.

“It goes back to when Disneyland was getting started. You never knew that every ride was sponsored by Monsanto or sponsored by Nestle or by GE. That’s how Disneyland was built.”

Each IP can find a different path into the market on a case-by-case basis.

“That’s the beauty of our model,” Haddadian said. “It depends on the story and who is the audience. We listen to the data about where to go next.”

Carroll noted that it’s not so different from the days of testing a new game on Facebook, putting up a new game and trying out 10 different ads to see which had the highest click-through rates.

“This really allows us to kind of take that mentality of seeing what people like, seeing where the clicks are, but actually making four or five different islands on UEFN and seeing which ones are more engaged with people without having to spend a half a million dollars on each one,” Carroll said.

Partnerships

Iconic Arts is building the foundations for a global entertainment company with some of the biggest IP companies and brands in Japan through a newly formed joint venture (JV) created by lead investor and advisor, Motoki Tani, who was also the co-founder of Animoca Brands KK.

“Through this JV, Iconic Arts will serve as the entertainment partner for global consumer brands to develop IP across film, television, gaming and merchandising,” said Tani, in a statement.

Tani was previously the head of trading at JP Morgan and managing director at Hong Kong-based Millennium.

For the last year, the team has been developing an original slate of IP by using a unique workflow which combines talented creators with emerging technologies such as a set of proprietary AI-powered tools that help lower cost of development by up to 90%, while derisking negative audience sentiment. For example, one tool enables creators to materialize worlds for UGC platforms such as Fortnite, Roblox or any multiplayer native environment with no code, while maintaining their art direction.

These UGC platforms serve as market testing and community building environments for their IP.

“We are applying a Silicon Valley approach to the hit-driven models of Hollywood and gaming studios, cutting costs and risks in developing original IP, with timeless storytelling at the heart of our business,” said Haddadian.

Iconic Arts has also brought on specialized corporate development executive and in-house counsel Aric Jain, formerly at leading IP law firm Wilmerhale. Aric will be working closely with Charles Lew, Chris Mattmann and California lawmakers to help draft bills for the ethical applications of AI within IP development.

The executive team

Haddadian has spent over a decade in the intersection of entertainment, technology and gaming being an early Bitcoin investor and serial entrepreneur since 2012. He was also cofounder of Los Angeles-based media company TheFutureParty, which was acquired by NVE Experience Agency in 2019. He formerly worked on the Star Atlas massively multiplayer online Web3 game, where he hired 230 people.

“This is the future. And I think that the Hollywood studios are going to have a really hard time embracing this. It doesn’t work in their model,” he said. “This is the Silicon Valley product approach. This is a real next generation entertainment company. You cannot do this unless you have a multidisciplinary team.”

Alec Roth, cofounder, director and executive producer: Roth comes from a vast career and lineage of Hollywood storytelling with having just completed his directorial debut Billy Knight, featuring stars like Al Pacino, Charlie Heaton, and Diana Silvers, along with producing Desert Road through his production
company Firebrand Media Group.

Matthew Medney, cofounder and chief creative officer: Medney is leading the development on the studio’s inaugural slate of IP. Medney was previously the CEO of legendary Heavy Metal Magazine, and he is one of the most prolific sci-fi writers having penned books and creative directed for Floyd Mayweather, Bobby Wagner of the Seattle Seahawks, Steve Aoki, and Rolling Loud. He recently launched Gungnir Books, a sister company of Iconic Arts, that publishes graphic novels, prose and art books for the studio.

Mo Yazdani, cofounder and COO: Yazdani began his career in fintech and banking working at a management consulting firm and State Street before moving into tech as a product manager, shipping over 20 interactive software products for large brands. Prior to founding Iconic Arts, Mo was a product lead at a Web3 gaming company.

Jack Sheehan, cofounder and CSO: Sheehan also comes from the Hollywood agency and studio system, having held positions at Universal, Sony & WME before producing over 50 independent films with stars such as Keanu Reeves, Margot Robbie, and Tom Hanks, most recently serving as the President of Archstone Entertainment.

Omar Abdelwahed, CTO: Abdelwahed was previously the technical director at Vancouver-based East Side Games, VP of Engineering at Playable Worlds and the former Head of Studio at Softbank Robotics where he launched the first humanoid social robot in the US named Pepper. He also led Ubisoft’s first games development studio in San Francisco.

Rob Carroll, chief gaming officer: Carroll comes from a tenured career at LucasArts, Zynga, Wargaming, Unity, and most recently at Economics Design. He has shipped over 40 titles in the gaming space.

“We’re all storytellers and we love all these formats,” Haddadian said. “We love film and television, we love gaming, we’re gamers at heart. But we also love comic books. We also love toys, right? We know that merchandising and consumer products are a great part of this ecosystem. And so this is the common alignment that all of us have had.”