01

The studios have over-leveraged both their hard and soft assets.

On the financial side, the numbers are public: Warner Bros Discovery carries $34.6 billion in net debt.² Paramount was downgraded to junk in March 2024.³ Disney holds $45.8 billion in borrowings.⁴ Companies leveraged at this level do not take creative risk – and the entities that own them do not want them to. The same institutional investors (BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street) hold the largest stakes in rival studios simultaneously; their incentive is dividends and buybacks, not creative investment. Comcast's annual distributions rose from $3.2 billion in 2008 to $18 billion in 2022.⁵

On the cultural side, the damage is just as severe. The studio system condescends to audiences it does not understand and panders to markets it cannot afford to lose. Nine of the top ten highest-grossing worldwide releases in 2024 were sequels.⁶ Adults in their forties get capes and video-game adaptations; the 2012 Red Dawn remake had its Chinese antagonist digitally replaced to avoid angering the CCP.

Studios are still thought of as the natural home for film – they are not; they are debt-servicing operations that happen to release films. The result is a monopoly collapsing under its own weight; between 2001 and 2021, the share of mid-budget films fell by roughly two-thirds.¹ The entire mid-budget genre category for adults – once a thriving middle market – has been turned into a ghetto.⁷

02

The vacuum is not speculative. The audience for adult thrillers is large, active, and measurably underserved. When the material is authentic, they show up:⁸

Streamers are spending against this demand, though the supply is inconsistent. Thrillers are the single largest genre category in SVOD spending – $12 billion annually, 24% of total streamer content investment.⁹ Amazon built Prime Video's identity around Reacher (54.6M viewers in 19 days for Season 3) and Jack Ryan.¹⁰ Netflix's The Night Agent generated 812 million hours viewed in its first six months.¹¹ Slow Horses averages 97% on Rotten Tomatoes across five seasons, won two Emmys, and has spent 503 days on Apple's domestic charts.¹²

Disappearing Supply

Rising Demand

03

Material rooted in operational reality – whether from direct experience or obsessive research – resonates with mass audiences and compounds across format and time.

• Ian Fleming / James Bond. Twenty-five films over sixty years have grossed $7.8 billion worldwide.¹⁵ Amazon cited Bond as a primary driver of its $8.45 billion acquisition of MGM.¹⁶
• Tom Clancy. 100 million copies in print,¹⁷ $788 million in theatrical box office,⁸ and a video game portfolio – Rainbow Six, Ghost Recon, Splinter Cell, The Division – that has sold 114 million units and generated over €1 billion in revenue.¹⁸ On television, Amazon's Jack Ryan became one of Prime Video's flagship series. Clancy's IP was a key driver of the MGM acquisition.¹⁶
• Robert Ludlum / Jason Bourne. Ludlum's 500 million copies in print spawned a $1.64 billion film franchise.¹⁹ In 2025, NBCUniversal acquired all Bourne rights in perpetuity after seven competitive bids.²⁰
• John Grisham. 300 million copies sold and 37 consecutive #1 bestsellers,²¹ adapted into some of the most commercially successful legal thrillers in history.
• Jack Carr. Navy SEAL produced The Terminal List, which generated 1.6 billion viewing minutes in its first week on Amazon – the platform's #1 series at launch.²²
• Le Bureau des Légendes. Creator Eric Rochant spent years embedded with France's DGSE (foreign intelligence) and maintained advisory relationships with active personnel throughout production. Five seasons, widely regarded as the best espionage series ever made, sold internationally on modest budgets. Paramount+ is now adapting it as The Agency with Michael Fassbender.

Authentic sourcing also carries a civilizational argument – about power, institutions, and the cost of violence. Reagan called The Hunt for Red October "the perfect yarn" and it shaped Cold War policy:²³

"[Clancy] didn't invent impossible schemes. He invented things that could happen. Some things that actually have happened over the years bear some resemblance to scenarios that he put together. Tom could sense things and see things in a way that others couldn't." — Colin Powell²⁴

Audiences learned to trust the name, which reduced acquisition cost, improved performance, and made each subsequent release more valuable than the last.

04

OXBRIER can exploit this opportunity without the debt, the dilettantes, or the dysfunction:

Brand

A24 is valued at $3.5 billion²⁵ because audiences recognize the brand before they recognize any single title. OXBRIER is building the equivalent signal for adult thrillers rooted in operational reality – a curatorial identity that reduces marketing cost, improves opening performance, and compounds with every release.

Material

Our exclusive network inside defense, intelligence, and national security is the sourcing mechanism that feeds the brand material no one else can get. Studios cannot replicate this organically.

Team

Jev Valles (West Point, UTA, 42), Colin Nagy (Global Head of Brand, Instagram/Threads), and Chris Papasadero (Green Beret, serial founder). Curatorial credibility, brand discipline, and studio-grade expertise.

Talent

Post-strike, Hollywood employment remains well below pre-2023 levels.²⁶ Strong material draws strong attachments – at favorable terms.

Disciplined Economics

Pre-sales, tax incentives, and gap financing cover the majority of each production budget before equity is deployed; Blumhouse produced $5 billion in box office on $204 million in combined costs.²⁷

Library

Each OXBRIER release adds to a library that compounds across format and time. Institutional capital now treats entertainment IP as a standalone asset class – Ackman just bid $64 billion for Universal Music Group²⁸ and Shamrock Capital raised a $400M fund for content IP alone.²⁹

05

Our slate currently holds a dozen fully-developed properties spanning the genre. Topics include corporate espionage, extraordinary rendition, and psychological warfare.

All were inbound sourced – from the Pentagon, the three-letter agencies, defense contractors, national security reporters, and international criminals. Most are based on the real story behind the headlines, and several have triggered FOIA requests.

Three projects from this slate will move to production during the fund period.

06

1. Studios are structurally incapable of serving this category.
2. The audience is massive and underserved.
3. Brand authority built on authentic material is a compounding asset.
4. OXBRIER has the sourcing network, curatorial discipline, and the slate strategy to dominate the territory.

Thank you. For access to the confidential document set or to set a meeting, please contact: