Sony is buying Snoopy, Charlie Brown, and more characters from the Peanuts brand in a surprise deal worth $457 million.
Charles M. Schulz’s iconic characters are particularly popular in Japan and Asia these days, where you’ll see all kinds of merchandise collaborations with retailers like Uniqlo and GU to name just two.
Sony Music Entertainment already owns a 39% stake in the comic strip’s parent company Peanuts Holding. Now, in conjunction with Sony Pictures Entertainment, it’s confirmed it will purchase Canadian media company WildBrain’s 41% stake as well.
Subscribe to Push Square on YouTube166k
This will effectively give the Japanese giant complete control of the brand, although Schulz and his family will retain ownership of the remaining 20%.
As a result, and pending regulatory approval, Peanuts Holdings will become a consolidated subsidiary of Sony. It’ll be run and operated by Sony Music Entertainment in Japan, with Sony Pictures Entertainment contributing management support.
Sony Music Entertainment’s Shunsuke Muramatsu said of the deal:
“Since 2018, SMEJ has been proud to be part of the partnership behind ‘Peanuts’, an iconic global entertainment brand with a 75-year legacy of delighting audiences worldwide. With this additional ownership stake, we are thrilled to be able to further elevate the value of the ‘Peanuts’ brand by drawing on the Sony Group’s extensive global network and collective expertise.”
Snoopy, Charlie Brown, and the various other Peanuts characters debuted as part of a newspaper comic strip all the way back in 1950, but the characters have stood the test of time.
Obviously, this deal has very little to do with PlayStation, but it does once again show Sony’s overall ambition of becoming a multimedia powerhouse.
In the past few years, the company has invested heavily into mediums like anime, as it gradually moves away from its consumer electronics roots and embraces entertainment more and more.