Seeing as Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s South Park is still ridiculously popular in its 16th season, they managed to make a puppet movie that was a financial success with Team America: World Police, and their Broadway musical, The Book of Mormon, has sold out an unheard of number of shows in New York, on tour, and now in a production being staged in Chicago, these guys have managed to acquire a pretty big pile of money through serving the public funny filth. One gets visions of them swimming through piles of gold coins, Scrooge McDuck style.
After your creative endeavors have netted you as much as $300m, where on Earth do you put all of your money? Well, a rap mogul like Jay-Z would tell you that it’s time to start founding your own companies, taking control of your own product, and cultivating your own personal brand. And, seeing as rap moguls like Jay-Z are the closest things we have to heroes these days, Parker and Stone are about to take this exact path by taking their $300m and using it to form their own content creation studio, Important Studios.
The news of this new venture comes from The New York Times, who says that the new company will work on funding projects in television and film, as well as in theater. As might be expected given The Book of Mormon’s Tony wins, the fact that it continues to generate close to $5m a week, and the fact that it’s about to open yet another production in London, the first project that Important Studios is thought to be tackling is a feature film adaptation of the controversial but popular musical.
Given the pretty much guaranteed financial success of this first venture, Important Studios should soon have even more clout and even more financial reserves than they’re starting with, which will provide Parker and Stone unheard of opportunity to produce who knows how many twisted and subversive projects, across all forms of media.
When asked to provide a quip to color the launch of their new company, the duo responded by saying, “Having worked with several different studios over the years, we came to realize that our favorite people in the world are ourselves.” Now that these two are in control of their own destinies, media is likely about to get a whole lot filthier. Good luck to those of you trying to raise kids. You’re going to have a hard time keeping all of this stuff out of their ears while the rest of us sit back and enjoy the laughter.