David Madden has been working in entertainment since 1978. He’s overseen the development of Oscar®-winning films and Emmy®-winning television series. He’s led some of the most important companies in the entertainment industry, serving as President of Programming, Entertainment Networks at AMC Networks; President of Fox Television Studios; and President of Entertainment for the Fox Broadcasting Company, to name a few.

But he’s never had a job like the one he has now. In 2022, Madden joined WEBTOON Productions, where he serves as president of the production company. In this role, he seeks out the best stories from two global online storytelling platforms – Wattpad and WEBTOON – and adapts them for film and television. We spoke with David about his incredible career, the makings of great stories, and the future of entertainment.

DAVIS READ: David, thanks again for joining me today. Prior to WEBTOON Productions, you left an indelible mark on the American television industry. What first drew you to a career in entertainment? Did you have a creative family growing up?

DAVID MADDEN: I grew up in Chicago and Detroit where my father directed industrial films, and he was quite successful in that world. We moved out to Los Angeles when I was 12 so my dad could try to transition into a Hollywood career. He directed about half-a-dozen movies, but nothing you would have ever heard of.

In college, I wanted to be a novelist. I wrote a novel that was wildly pretentious, and it was immediately rejected (as it should have been) by the few people I sent it to. That was shattering to my frail ego, so I dropped out of grad school and re-tooled my thinking. Since I was living in LA and thought of myself as a writer, I started writing screenplays. To support myself, I got a job as a script reader at 20th Century Fox. I was reading and covering scripts by day and writing at night. After about a year and a half doing that, my boss Sherry Lansing offered me a junior executive job.

My first reaction was: “I’m an artist, not a suit!” But I looked myself in the mirror and recognized that as a writer, I was okay, but I wasn’t great. I had read enough scripts at that point that I could discern the two. I was also intrigued by the process by which movies were made – what made movies successful, and why. I took that job, and that led to the career path that I’ve been on since. 

DR: Before becoming a television executive, you produced several films. What were some of those early successes in your career?

DM: Well, my feature career had two halves. As a studio executive at Fox and Paramount I worked on a film called Children of a Lesser God, for which Marlee Matlin won the Best Actress Oscar®; The Accused, for which Jodie Foster won the Best Actress Oscar®; and Fatal Attraction, which was one of the highest grossing films of its year.

As a producer, the most meaningful moment was producing The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, which is a thriller we did for Disney that was very commercially successful and led me to a moment of hubris where I thought I could direct. I directed two little movies which were terrible,and that led me straight back to producing.

DR: In television, you oversaw the development of several critically acclaimed shows like The Shield and The Americans. How did those projects come about?

DM: With The Shield, I was at a division of Fox called Fox Television Studios, and Shawn Ryan had this brilliant script that we were going to send to HBO. Before we could get anyone at HBO on the phone, a guy named Kevin Reilly joined FX and put out a press release saying basically, “We’re looking for gritty edgy dramas.” We sent it over there and they liked it, shot a pilot, and ordered it to series. In the first season, Michael Chiklis won an Emmy® for Best Actor. That let us know that there was a path forward on basic cable, and that would determine the next several years of my career.

The Americans was one of those cases where a writer named Joe Weisberg had a brilliant idea inspired by his years working in intelligence. It was just this very original story about marriage and family under the guise of a story about spy craft and international relations. It was a gift from an incredibly talented writer that we were thrilled to be involved with. 

DR: Your work now concerns something that seems like it could be the future of entertainment. For our readers who are not aware, what are Wattpad and WEBTOON, and what drew you to this company?

DM: When I was first approached about the role, I knew nothing about Wattpad or WEBTOON. As I was introduced to the two platforms, I fell in love with the storytelling.

Wattpad is a leading webnovel platform and storytelling community. The concept is simple: any human being on planet earth can put their story on Wattpad. WEBTOON on the other hand is the global leader and pioneer of the mobile webcomic format.

Between the two platforms, we have writers from 150+ countries, and we’re reaching 150 million people. There are stories on both WEBTOON and Wattpad that accumulate views in the hundreds of millions, even up to the billions.

What’s so exciting about the job I have is getting to read these stories that come from writers who are all over the world. They don’t know the “rules” of how you’re supposed to write to succeed in Hollywood, they just write what they want to write.

When you’ve been working in the business for as long as I have, you get to feeling like you’ve read everything. But in this job, I’ve found a lot of stories where I think, “I’ve never heard this idea before.” That’s a great feeling.

DR: Could you tell me what WEBTOON Productions is, and how your work interfaces with these two platforms? 

DM: I have a team of nine people in LA and several people overseas. Our mission is to find the most film-friendly, television-friendly, or animation-friendly projects on both platforms and try and get them produced. Just how not every book is right for film and television, not every successful webnovel or webcomic is right for film and television.

Just because something is on one of our platforms does not mean we automatically own the rights to it. If there’s something we like, we reach out to the author and make a deal for the rights. Most of the time, that happens easily, because the writers are excited that we’re interested in making a movie or a show out of their creation.

DR: How do you know a story is right for film or television?

DM: We rely on data, which is very helpful for selling to data-driven companies like Netflix, or Amazon, or Apple. But we also rely on instinct; the feeling of reading something and knowing that it’s special and different.

I think that both on our platforms and in general, authenticity wins. When writers tell a story that means something to them, that tends to connect to an audience. That’s kind of what we look for.

Also, we live in a film and television landscape where stories inevitably need an idea that is easy to synopsize and easily marketable. Those stories where I can tell you in a couple of sentences what it’s about and you can say, “Oh that sounds interesting, I’ll check that out.” They have an easily understandable idea behind them, and yet they possess something unique that we haven’t seen before.

That said, you may go home tonight and watch a movie or a show, and you can’t necessarily explain why you like it, you just like it. Sometimes our job is like that, too. 

DR: You’ve worked with some important producing partners including Lucky Chap, Imagine Entertainment, and The Henson Company, to name a few. What is unique about the stories on your platforms that these companies are unable to find in the traditional publishing landscape?

DM: Whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing, buyers are looking for IP. They want things that have an established fan base they can count on to show up for a film or series, and that’s what we have.

We also have a lot of data surrounding that IP. Both platforms are built to be interactive for the readers. If you’re reading a Wattpad story, and you read a moment that you react to – somebody kisses somebody, one character hits another – you can write in the margins, “That was awesome!” or “That was awful!” and the fans can have a whole discussion that way. On the backend, we can see all that data. Sentence by sentence, we can see how readers are responding to a narrative.

Beyond being a repository of great stories, we’re also a real marketing engine. We can tell our users we’re adapting that comic or webnovel that they loved so much into a movie, and remind them when it is coming out.

Case in point, we had a movie on Tubi called Sidelined: The QB and Me based on a popular Wattpad story. When that movie launched on Tubi, we supported it very aggressively on the platform. People heard about it, they came and watched the movie, and they loved it. Now, we’re in post-production on a sequel to the movie that will release this fall. 

DR: Just to speak to the global nature of the audience on Wattpad and WEBTOON, Mala Influencia, a film adaptation of author “TeensSpirit”’s Spanish-language Wattpad webnovel with 52 million reads, premiered at #1 in 40 countries around the world. To what do you attribute the success of international titles like this?

DM: We are really effective at delivering our audience to films and television adaptations. There’s a movie we did for Netflix a few years ago called Through My Window (A través de mi ventana in Spanish) which is still number nine on Netflix’s all-time most viewed non-English movies chart. That was a very popular Wattpad story where the audience clearly showed up to watch the adaptation. We have a huge hit show in Thailand right now. We’re in post-production on a movie that we made in Italy that was phenomenally successful there. Even if these stories are culturally specific, the themes are universal. They’re about love, aspiration, and things that connect across cultures.

DR: I can imagine that for readers, it’s incredibly gratifying to see the story they have been supporting since day one go on to become a successful movie. Do you think there’s a uniquely close relationship between the authors and the audience on your platforms?

DM: There’s a show on Netflix called Heartstopper, which is built on a very popular WEBTOON. There are people who love that WEBTOON and are extremely excited to be watching the adaptation on Netflix. But I’m sure there are people who watch it on Netflix and have never heard of the WEBTOON. These stories have to stand on their own.

We definitely have beloved authors. We have this project we’re working on called Lore Olympus, which we’re doing with The Henson Company. That author, Rachel Smythe, who lives in New Zealand in a small town, wrote this story people love and now she’s become a bit of a rockstar. She gets massive acclaim every time she goes to Comic Con. She’s won every comic book award you can possibly win. Her fans adore her, and it’s all because of this story that she shared on WEBTOON.

People like that the successful authors on our platforms are people “just like them.” They didn’t have connections to publishing houses, they aren’t nepo babies, they weren’t part of some Hollywood legacy – they are ordinary people with extraordinary stories. 

DR: Having worked both in the traditional film and television industry, and now for this very forward-thinking company, how have you seen the entertainment industry change overall? What do you predict for the future of entertainment?

DM: I have been in some version of entertainment since 1978, and there has been no period in my career where people were saying, “Everything is great!” People now look back at certain decades and say “Wasn’t it great back then?” But at the time, nobody felt that way.

Yes, the business is going through a hard time right now. There are a lot of reasons to feel anxious. I don’t wish to sound saccharine, but I do believe that we all need narratives in our lives. To quote an oft-quoted Joan Didion line, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” People will always want stories, whether they are on movie screens, or streaming services, or Wattpad and WEBTOON. The love of storytelling is intrinsic to the human experience.

The economics of it may be screwed-up right now, but I do believe in the long-term survival of the industry. Because we need it!