Former Xbox designer Elan Lee and The Oatmeal cartoonist Matthew Inman launched the first card game ‘Exploding Kittens’ via Kickstarter in 2015 and raised $8.7 million for the first game in the first 30 days. Since then, they’ve released nearly 30 tabletop games and a handful of digital games, selling more than 36 million games worldwide.
On Friday, Netflix will launch an “Exploding Kittens” TV series to coincide with updates to the streamer’s mobile game “Exploding Kittens,” which will bring playable characters from the new show into the format.
For Wednesday’s episode of Variety‘s “Strictly Business” podcast, “Exploding Kittens” masterminds Lee and Inman spoke with Variety‘s Senior Business Writer, TV and Video Games Jennifer Maas on how their company turned its best-selling tabletop game into a Netflix series and video game while maintaining its primary business as a consumer products brand.
The first season of Netflix’s animated series ‘Exploding Kittens’ follows the story of Godcat (Tom Ellis) and Devilcat (Sasheer Zamata), and the ‘ultimate battle between good and evil… except Godcat is distracted by a pigeon he saw in the garden and Devilcat is taking a nap on someone’s laptop.
Inman serves as showrunner on the series alongside Shane Kosakowski, with additional executive producers including Lee, Mike Judge, Greg Daniels and Dustin Davis of Bandera Entertainment, and Peter Chernin and Jenno Topping for Chernin Entertainment Group.
“All we ever really wanted to do, at least in the beginning, was make some card games… Once the Netflix show really took shape, Matt started leading the show team, as far as, this is what these characters sound like, this is they sound, they behave, this is how they move, this is how the world actually looks, rather than just a bunch of static images,” Lee told ‘Strictly Business’. “And armed with that, we could start to say, okay, this is a world instead of just a bunch of comics, this is a real world. So that means we can start making games, more games, more moving games – digital games, mobile games, VR games. We can start exploring where else these characters might live, and how our audience might experience them. And so it was like this nice one-two punch: let’s start by building a really strong audience, building simple, fast, easy, fun party games, expand that into the world of TV, and then now we can expand entire IP. outside because we now know what it looks and sounds like.”
Inman calls the past four and a half years of making the TV series “Exploding Kittens” “the best film class” he’s ever been a part of because he was “actively learning” on the job.
“Where the rubber meets the road, in terms of difficulty, was that when you create a web comic, people hear whatever voice they want to hear in their heads when they read your comic. And usually, if it’s written well, it’s a very funny voice,” Inman said. “In television or animation, they hear whatever voice the actor is saying, or the way the character moves, and it can all make a joke or make a joke. So that’s where I had to be very diligent and good at making sure the comedy came through because there are tons of funny jokes that are written into the script and then when they’re executed they slightly change or break. It’s the same with art. I draw people in a certain way; I have a signature kind of inbred frog-eyed look to everything I draw. And I had to make sure that that inbred frog-eyed look was well ingrained in everyone at Netflix, and it was. It hangs on my office door.”
‘Strictly business’, yes Variety‘s weekly podcast featuring conversations with industry leaders about media and entertainment. (Click here to subscribe to our free newsletter.) New episodes drop every Wednesday and can be downloaded from Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Spotify, Google Play, SoundCloud and more.