For those who like to keep track on big picture Peanuts business, there’s been a shift in ownership of Peanuts Holdings LLC, the owners of the key Peanuts intellectual property. Since 2018, the ownership has been split between the Schulz family, who owned 20%; WildBrain, who owned 41%, and Sony Music Entertainment Japan, who owned 39%. Today it was announced (and covered in major sources) that Sony was buying out WildBrain’s share, giving them 80%. WildBrain will still be involved in the Peanuts business, creating animation and doing licensing.) Price was $453 million, giving an effective valuation to Peanuts as a whole north of a billion bucks.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? My immediate instinctive reaction was one of concern. I perhaps spent too much time when I was younger reading fiction about companies that had two owners of 49% each and one of 2%, and that 2% gave them great leverage because it took a majority of the ownership to do things, and when there was a disagreement between the two main owners, the little guy got to be the tiebreaker. So I kind of saw it as that neither WildBrain nor Sony could do something stupid on their own, they either had to both agree or they had to get Schulzes on their side — and I like Schulzes having leverage in these situations, as they take the preservation of the legacy seriously. However, I have no idea is that’s how control actually works in this particular situation; intra-corporate relationships are built on huge documents that go beyond simple numbers.

I can’t even tell if this is a sign that Sony has some new master plan for Peanuts or if they just had money that WildBrain needed.

Anyway, Peanuts has been in this situation before. From 2010 to 2017, Iconix owned 80% of the Peanuts property holder, and then they sold that 80% to WildBrain (then named DHX Media), who held onto all of that for a year before selling almost half of their share to Sony. I don’t recall any vast disasters happening there. There may have been some sub-optimal financial exploitation of the property, but I don’t care.

I really don’t care whether Peanuts is insanely profitable or merely vastly profitable. What I do care about is that Schulz’s Peanuts continues to be a work that gets respect and gets read by new fans, because I believe in Peanuts and how its existence as a cultural work serves humanity. And while I’m not against Peanuts licensing, I would also not be vastly saddened if there were fewer Snoopy colognes and Woodstock dog toys or whatever (except that I like some of the people in the Peanuts Industrial Complex whose jobs depend on the need for licensed goods.)

Oh, and there better still be new Peanuts books frequently, or else what will I do with my time?

Share the news!