When it comes to success stories in the entertainment world, it doesn’t get much better than the one about a pair of regular guys from Colorado, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, who took cutout paper dolls, animated them and triumphed on cable television, on the Web, at the multiplex and on Broadway.
Frederic J. Brown/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Matt Stone, left, and Trey Parker are forming a production company called Important Studios.
Last week, Mr. Stone arrived at a coffee shop in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York so bundled up that he resembled Kenny, who always shows up on “South Park” encased in a big orange parka. He was leaving the next day for London, where the fourth production of “The Book of Mormon” will soon begin a run.
Over the course of 16 seasons and 237 episodes, “South Park,” an assault on good taste built on the misadventures of four crudely animated and crudely spoken boys, has entered every pore of the culture. In the meantime, the two creators have helped put Comedy Central on the map, made four feature films, produced a sitcom and landed a Broadway hit with “Book of Mormon,” produced by Scott Rudin and Anne Garefino and created along with Robert Lopez.
Now Mr. Stone and Mr. Parker are about to finish a video game version of “South Park,” and they recently announced that they were forming a production company called Important Studios, valued at $300 million.
The success of “South Park” is a stark lesson in the fundamentals of entertainment: if you tell stories that people want to hear, the audience will find you.
This is true no matter how fundamentally the paradigms shift, or how many platforms evolve.
“We’ve been doing it long enough to figure out that content will ride on top of whatever wave comes along,” Mr. Stone said.
You might think that after all they’ve accomplished, they would be ready to step back a bit, and this is essentially true. Don’t worry, they aren’t going to actually kill Kenny, who for years was done away with in every episode. But “South Park,” which generally has been produced in two batches of seven episodes for a total of 14 every year, will be cut back to a single run of 10 episodes, beginning on Sept. 25.
“Why did we do seven and seven to begin with?” Mr. Stone said. “We just sort of made that up. And we are switching to 10 for the same reason. It just sounded like a good number, and we won’t break up the year so we can more easily do other stuff.”
The change sounds casually tossed off, but there is nothing unformed about the thinking that drives their choices.
“There is no appointment viewing anymore,” Mr. Stone said.
“In our first season, you had to show up on Wednesday nights at 10 p.m. on the comedy channel to catch the show. Now, I don’t even know where or how people watch our show. We sort of don’t really care about ratings. It’s more important to come up with work that will add to the library in a way that we’re proud of and will make people want to catch the show wherever they want to.”
That could happen on Netflix, on iTunes, on an ad-supported streaming format on Hulu, or hosted by the servers in the Los Angeles offices of Mr. Stone’s and Mr. Parker’s company.
The two men had the prescience to negotiate a 50-50 split on all digital revenue with Comedy Central, and part of the reason they remain so engaged is that they have real participation in the “South Park” enterprise.
“We have always owned our stuff or acted like we do,” Mr. Stone said as he worked his way through a late lunch. He pointed to Louis C. K., the comedian who took his last comedy special directly to fans on the Web, as an example of an artist moving to the sweet spot of the business that she or he creates.
“Owning your own stuff means that you control not only the content, but the life you are living while you are producing it,” he said.
“And then, if things go well, you can be part of the upside.”
Mr. Stone thinks it’s silly for creators to rely only on outside financing. Why drop years of sweat equity into creating something but not invest any cold hard cash?
“It took us four years to work out ‘Book of Mormon,’ and when you think of the opportunity cost of that — other projects that we walked by — it would be sort of silly not to put money in,” he said.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: January 28, 2013
An earlier version of this column misstated a plot point in “South Park.” While the character Kenny was once killed in every episode, that is no longer the case. The earlier version also misstated the circumstances of his repeated deaths. While he has met his fate in a variety of ways over the years, he was not routinely “ritually sacrificed.”
The Media Equation: ‘South Park’ Creators Fortify Their Content Empire
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