South Park's Matt Stone & Trey Parker Just Reached a 5-Year, $1.5 Billion Deal with Paramount+

LA Times – The creators of Comedy Central’s “South Park” reached a breakthrough Monday in the tense negotiations over the streaming rights of the long-running satirical cartoon.

Paramount agreed to buy the global streaming rights for “South Park” to bring the show to the company’s digital service, Paramount+, for the first time in the U.S., according to three people close to the negotiations who were not authorized to comment.

The deal with Trey Parker and Matt Stone, through their Park County production company, values the global streaming rights at $300 million a year, according to two of the people close to the agreement, who could not discuss the matter publicly because the deal is not final.

There was a time when South Park was appointment television for me. I feel like it was appointment television for everyone. South Park and Family Guy were the peak of animated network television. Personally, I always thought American Dad was funnier than Family Guy. Roger from American Dad is one of the most underrated characters in all of television. But as far as mainstream popularity goes, it was always South Park and Family Guy.

But as far as South Park goes... I haven't watched a new episode of South Park in forever. Whatever episodes featured PC Principal were the last ones I remember being locked into. Since streaming platforms like Netflix, Hulu, Showtime, Paramount, Apple TV, and whatever combination of the words HBO & Max that company is going with right now... since all those streaming platforms took over, I haven't even considered watching South Park. For whatever reason, the death of cable TV coincided with the death of South Park. For me at least.

But that's a me problem. New South Parks have been available on streaming since 2014. If you'd have asked me, I'd have told you South Park was falling off. That South Park wasn't worth nearly as much money as it used to be. But apparently, I'm so fucking wrong about that. Because Paramount+ is giving Trey Parker and Matt Stone $1.5 BILLION DOLLARS to pump out 50 episodes over the course of 5 years. 

The five-year deal means the show will fetch $1.5 billion for streaming alone. The sum preserves the show’s status as one of the world’s most valuable TV franchises.

As part of the deal, Park County agreed to produce 10 episodes a year. Paramount was eager to bring the cartoon home. In 2019, previous corporate managers licensed “South Park” to rival HBO Max as Paramount’s streaming service was still in development. But that decision left Paramount+ out in the cold — much like the fictional mountain town of South Park, Colo.

The HBO Max deal expired in late June.

It's always funny to me how much the bar has been lowered when it comes to what's expected of TV shows. I recently watched Lost for the first time. I was about 10 episodes in and thought to myself, "I must be getting close to the end of Season 1". 

Then I almost fell off my couch when I saw Lost has 25 episode seasons. Nowadays I'm impressed if a new show has any season with more than 8 episodes. I swear there was a time when Matt Stone and Trey Parker were creating unbelievable episodes of television in a week's time. The fact that South Park is getting $300M a year to make 10 episodes a season... that's hard to even wrap your mind around. They deserve every bit of it. South Park will forever stand the test of time. They should get all the money in the world. And now they're in the news for moving to Paramount+... I might actually get back into it.