ACTIVELY BLACK
FOR THE STUDIO THAT BROUGHT GAMERS VALORANT AND LEAGUE OF LEGENDS, THE GAMES ARE JUST THE BEGINNING.
THE ATHLEISURE BRAND WAS FOUNDED TO UPLIFT
THE BLACK COMMUNITY.
IN JUST THREE YEARS, LANNY Smith has taken his athleisure company Actively Black to heights few clothing brands ever achieve. Last year, he outfitted the 2022 Nigerian Winter Olympics team and scored a licensing deal with Disney and Marvel to create a collection inspired by Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. More recently, the latest version of best-selling basketball video game NBA 2K24, which debuted in September, lets gamers dress their avatars in Actively Black clothes and accessories.
Smith launched the brand on Juneteenth 2020 in the wake of the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. “I saw all these brands come out with declarations . . . ‘We wanna do this for the Black community.’ And I just felt like it was performative,” he says. He wanted Actively Black to be “a brand that makes the Black community feel the way I felt walking out of Black Panther.” The company unveiled its first products five months later. Since then, it has been a whirlwind of celebrity partnerships and collaborations with people Smith saw as idols, including FUBU founder Daymond John, whose personal call to Disney’s licensing team got Smith in the room to pitch his Black Panther collection.
Smith’s direct-to-consumer business did $5.6 million in 2022 sales, about 10% of which he donated to such grassroots organizations as the Liberation Fund and Compton Girls Club. “We’re not just building another brand to try to be the next unicorn in this space,” he says. “There’s a mission, a purpose behind this, and that’s how I’m measuring our success.” —JW
THE HORROR STUDIO
KNOWS IT CAN DELIVER A HIT (AND VIRAL MOMENTS). NEXT
STOP: WORLD DOMINATION.
BLUMHOUSE, THE PRO
duction company that’s become known for making big bets on lower-budget horror movies—like Paranormal Activity and The Purge—has been around since 2000. But in the past year, the company has laid the groundwork to put a monster under every bed by becoming the preeminent brand in horror across TV, live events, and theme parks. “We’re taking, or about to take, the brand to all those places,” says Blumhouse president Abhijay Prakash.
Part of the shift came last fall, ahead of the January premiere of M3gan. The marketing for the film— a campy blend of horror and humor, exemplified in a viral clip of its titular AI doll dancing menacingly down a hallway mid–killing spree— became ubiquitous on social media and propelled the $12 million film to a $176.8 million box-office haul.
Beyond M3gan, Blumhouse is expanding the horror fanbase with content on the big and small screens designed to appeal to different audiences, including a new Exorcist
movie and The Thing About Pam,
which is part of Blumhouse testing “what horror can look like on TV,” Prakash says. Blumhouse is also making horror more diverse with its screenwriting fellowship, launched this year in an effort to better reflect the company’s audience, which skews heavily nonwhite.
With its place in entertainment on solid footing, the company is upping its experiential event offerings, including theme-park attractions and even virtual experiences. Horror, Prakash says, “is a bigger tent than a lot of folks think.” —Yasmin Gagne
Video games are at the forefront of entertainment culture, and few companies are proving it like
Riot Games. The studio behind free-to-play multiplayer sensations League of Legends and Valorant engages an increasingly diverse audience of more than 180 million monthly global players, and lately, Riot has been pushing the boundaries of the video-game experience to include esports, music, and TV.
The expansion of League of Legends’ animeinspired Star Guardian universe was the game’s 2022 event with the highest engagement—a coup for the content targeted at nonmale gamers.
Similarly, Riot’s Valorant Game Changers program is starting to bring more women into competitive esports. Its inaugural championship in 2022 was the most-watched women’s gaming tournament ever, with fans consuming more than 5 million hours of content.
Riot’s League of Legends World Championship is key to its esports dominance.
Last fall’s event saw 24 pro teams compete until two finalists went head-to-head at a sold-out San Francisco arena, with online viewership peaking at 5 million. Lil Nas X performed his tournament anthem “Star Walkin’, ” and
South Korea’s DRX earned the grand prize.
Francine Li, Riot’s global head of marketing, says its efforts— including Arcane,
the Lol-inspired
Netflix show that won four Emmys last fall— show that “there’s the game itself, but players love the entire world around it.” —Alex Dong