It has been a decade since former Saturday Night Live (NYSE: CMCSK and CMCSA) writer Max Brooks published the New York Times (NYSE: NYT) Best Seller book The Zombie Survival Guide. Three years later he published The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks and World War Z. (NYSE: VIA)
Leonardo DiCaprio went to war with Brad Pitt over the film rights to these three books in 2007 and six years and $125,000,000 later the first film in the trilogy will be released in Moscow this June 20, 2013. You can watch the official trailers: Here and here.
This was way back before The Walking Dead which premiered on October 31, 2010 on AMC (NASDAQ: AMCX) in the United States of America. You can watch the first two seasons on Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX) right now.
If you live in the United States of America or Canada and you cannot afford this television channel to watch the fourth season this October then drop me a line and I will explain to you how you can get every television channel available in your area for FREE legally for the rest of your life.
If your dream is to see your own words acted by Leonardo Dicaprio then all you have to do now is write a cool book about zombies and get it published by Bertelsmann, Pearson (NYSE: PSO), News (NYSE: NWS) and CBS (NYSE: CBS)
Viacom (NYSE: VIA) is distributing World War Z worldwide.
Viacom is currently the eighth leading Broadcasting & Cable company in the world. They sell annually over $13.2 billion. Their annual profits are over $2.2 billion. Only five Broadcasting & Cable companies make more money than them. If times are hard in the future they can always sell some assets and survive. With over $21.9 billion in assets it is easy to survive any economic recessions. Finally their market value is over $31.3 billion (As of May 2013) which makes it expensive for Comcast, Walt Disney (NYSE: DIS), News, Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) and DirecTV (NYSE: DTV) to eat them for breakfast.
If they get hungry they can always buy a smaller company for less money. There are still 18 profitable Broadcast & Cable companies that can be bought today for $29.4 billion or less. I like Scripps Network Interactive (NYSE: SNI)as the next target because they increased annual sales from $1.8 billion in 2010 to $2.3 billion in 2012 and they also increased total assets from $3.3 billion in 2010 to $4.1 billion in 2012.
More importantly, they have increased their liabilities from $1.4 billion in 2010 to $2.1 billion in 2012 which means that the banks are still lending them a ton of cash. In this day and age of very low interest rates it is extremely important to get as many credit cards as possible and use the loans wisely to buy the competition.
In hard economic times it is almost impossible to get a loan even for large companies like General Electric (NYSE: GE), Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) and Citigroup (NYSE: C) which at one point in 2009 was 36% owned by the United States of America because they help them out with a $25 billion loan.
If World War Z is a financial success then the rest of the Hollywood studios will be forced to release their own Zombie franchises. DirecTV does not make films but they already entered the television show business a few years ago with Damages. Maybe they should produce their own Zombie television show to compete with The Walking Dead.
Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) already tried that with a pilot for Zombieland and failed.
Warm Bodies is a romantic comedy and was a huge financial success for Lionsgate (NYSE: LGF) with an investment of only $35,000,000 and over $116,000,000 in worldwide ticket sales. Lionsgate is a very safe investment for the long term as explained in more detail in Are Vampires a good investment?
This is the fourth article in the series. You may also enjoy Are aliens a good investment? and Are hobbits a good investment?