After signing a new $1.5 billion deal with Paramount, Trey Parker and Matt Stone are part of Hollywood’s most elite club.
If you piss off South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, they will make you pay—both financially and satirically. On July 2, after Comedy Central delayed the Season 27 premiere of the show because Paramount, the network’s parent company, was locked in a contentious negotiation for its streaming rights—in the midst of months-long acquisition of Paramount by David Ellison’s Skydance Media—Parker and Stone issued a statement on X.com and let it rip: “This merger is a shit show,” the duo wrote, “and it’s fucking up South Park.”
Both transactions were resolved this week, as Parker and Stone agreed Monday to a five-year, $1.5 billion streaming deal that will bring South Park to Paramount+ globally. And Thursday, the FCC officially approved the Skydance acquisition. The deal cements the duo’s place as the highest-paid TV showrunners in Hollywood and made the 55-year-old Parker and the 54-year-old Stone billionaires—worth an estimated $1.2 billion each.
But the new agreement—which will pay the pair at least $250 million per year—didn’t end Paramount’s headaches. In South Park’s season premiere, which aired Wednesday, Donald Trump is depicted in bed with Satan, and Jesus is seen warning the show’s young protagonists about the dangers of provoking him. “You guys saw what happened to CBS? Well, guess who owns CBS? Paramount,” says the Jesus character. “You really want to end up like Colbert?”
The comedically fearless Parker and Stone now enter television’s rare billionaire creative class, joining Oprah Winfrey, Tyler Perry, Dick Wolf and Jerry Seinfeld in the three-comma club.
That astonishing amount of money is a testament to the enduring popularity of South Park, which has been a cultural phenomenon since its debut on Comedy Central in 1997, becoming, in just its second season, the highest-rated non-sports program in basic cable history, with nearly six million viewers. Over the years it became indispensable to Comedy Central, and its 300-plus episodes have now become bulk inventory that re-air dozens of times per week.
Kenny Money: The new deal with Paramount will pay Parker and Stone $250 million a year to create new ‘South Park’ episodes through 2030.
Bob Riha, Jr./Getty Images
Parker and Stone’s real coup came in 2007, when the creators and their lawyer and business partner, Kevin Morris, struck a deal with the network to play South Park episodes online using a rudimentary Flash video player, agreeing to split the then-non-existent digital revenues 50-50 “in perpetuity.”
Then came the streaming revolution. Hulu licensed the show’s streaming rights in 2014 for $87.5 million and reupped for $110 million through 2019. HBO Max then won a bidding war over Peacock, Netflix and others to become South Park’s exclusive domestic streaming home for $550 million over five years. That deal expired in June.
Instead of just pocketing their half of the HBO deal, in 2021 Parker and Stone negotiated for a new arrangement with Paramount (which owns Comedy Central) for a guaranteed $155 million a year in exchange for creating new episodes of the show and their portion of the streaming revenue. Monday’s agreement renegotiated the terms of that deal, upping the annual payout to $250 million.
Parker and Stone pour that wealth into Park County, not only the location of South Park’s fictional town but also the name of their production studio, which is owned entirely by the pair. Founded in 2012, they route all income from their TV show, movie projects and stage productions of The Book of Mormon (which they cowrote) through the company, taking only an estimated $10 million per year in salary.
It’s a common corporate structure among Hollywood’s top earners, but unlike other companies such as Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine or Brad Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment, Park County has never taken on equity partners or investors. Instead, in 2012, Parker and Stone leveraged the existing and projected future income generated by South Park and other projects to score $60 million in convertible debt funding from media-focused merchant bank The Raine Group. As long as they paid off the loan on time, they would keep all of the equity. The bet on themselves paid off as the streaming dollars began to flow in, and in 2016 Parker and Stone bought out Raine, maintaining full ownership ever since.
Park County continues to use debt to fund the company’s growth, including securing an $800 million credit line from private equity giant The Carlyle Group in 2023. Using the cost of the debt and some clever Hollywood accounting around depreciating catalog value, Park County has been able to lower and delay its tax bills considerably.
The ultimate exit plan would be to one day sell the company, settle up with creditors and tax collectors, and pocket the remaining cash.
Sources tell Forbes that Viacom (Comedy Central’s then-parent company) and Park County discussed doing exactly that in 2019, a deal reminiscent of Disney’s acquisition of valuable brands such as Lucasfilm or Marvel. The two sides got as far as a $1 billion valuation before talks broke down. That same year Viacom was, just as it has been lately, in the midst of a messy merger with CBS that made high-priced acquisitions difficult. When the companies returned to the negotiating table in 2021, Park County’s overall production deal rang in at $935 million over six years—nearly the same price tag as the acquisition, without ownership changing hands.
Given Park County’s guaranteed revenue and strong profitability, Forbes estimates the enterprise value of the company could now reach as much as $3 billion in a potential sale, netting Parker and Stone more than $1 billion each.
Paramount and Park County’s most recent round of negotiations proved to be the toughest yet, and became an early referendum on the stewardship of Skydance’s David Ellison, son of the world’s second richest man Larry Ellison. He told analysts he wants his new Paramount to be “a creativity-first studio and the first stop for best-in-class storytellers.” Where previous owners had licensed some of the company’s biggest shows, like South Park and Yellowstone, to other streaming services for a short-term cash influx, it seems Ellison is prioritizing bringing everything back under the company’s own streaming platform, Paramount+.
It hadn’t gone entirely smoothly. In late June, Park County threatened legal action against Skydance, which they believed was tampering with their talks with Netflix and Warner Bros. about potentially obtaining South Park’s streaming rights. Paramount was motivated to make a deal and eager to avoid more negative publicity, like that which followed a $16 million settlement paid to Trump over a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris and the recent cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
Facing the prospect of another season premiere delay and potential trash talking on stage at San Diego Comic-Con this week—where Parker and Stone took a rare high road—Skydance and Paramount agreed Monday to rework Park County’s production deal in conjunction with the new streaming rights agreement, a sticking point in the negotiations.
With their pockets sufficiently lined by the $1.5 billion deal, Parker and Stone will produce 10 new episodes of South Park each year until 2030, and there’s little doubt they will continue to poke fun at both their parent company and a very litigious president. When asked at during a Comic-Con panel Thursday evening what to expect from the rest of this season, Stone quipped, “no politics,” drawing laughter from the crowd.
And Parker, when asked about Trump’s negative reaction to the first episode, answered with similar deadpan: “We’re terribly sorry.”
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