How a Los Angeles production house became a name that collectors recognize — even when they have never heard the company speak its own name aloud.
The Opening Credits Nobody Reads
Walk into any comic shop in Portland, Austin, or Toronto and pick up a copy of Creepshow Volume 2 from Skybound. Flip past the variant cover art, past the first splash page, and squint at the fine print near the indicia. Somewhere in that small block of legal text you will find two words: Cartel Entertainment. That is the entire footprint most fans ever see — a credit line buried beneath the ink.
Yet that same name has appeared on the production slate of one of Shudder's most-watched horror anthology series, on a ten-picture film development deal announced in April 2020 alongside Untitled Entertainment, and across the management rosters of working actors whose faces you would recognize but whose career architects you never think to ask about. Cartel Entertainment was, for thirteen years, the quiet infrastructure behind projects that reached millions of eyeballs — and then, in December 2024, the company quietly changed its sign on the door to Evoke Entertainment.
The rebrand did not make mainstream entertainment news cycles the way a studio merger might. It landed in trade outlets — Deadline, Señal News, VideoAge International — read mostly by people who already know what a first-look deal looks like. But here is the thing worth paying attention to: that quiet name change coincided with something less quiet happening in the collectibles market, where licensed entertainment merchandise had ballooned to a $166.78 billion global sector by 2024 (Valuates Reports, 2025). And Cartel, whether by design or circumstance, had planted flags there before the paperwork was even filed.
What the Company Actually Does — A Primer for People Who Only Know the Logo
Founded in 2011 by Stan Spry and Jeff Holland, Cartel Entertainment operated as a hybrid: part talent management firm, part production company, part rights holder. In industry shorthand, they were a "one-stop shop" for packaging — taking a property from concept through financing, attaching talent they already managed, and shepherding it to a distributor. It is a model that companies like Anonymous Content and Plan B built their reputations on, though Cartel ran leaner and targeted genre properties: horror, sci-fi, thrillers, family animation.
Spry himself came from the world that produces exactly the kind of content that generates cult followings. He is credited as creator of the Sharknado franchise — yes, that Sharknado, the SyFy property that sold more ironic watch-party T-shirts between 2013 and 2018 than most prestige dramas moved in units of anything. That background mattered. It gave Cartel an instinct for properties that audiences treat as identity markers rather than just entertainment products.
Productions That Left Fingerprints
- Creepshow (TV Series, Shudder/AMC) — Cartel held a co-production stake in the Greg Nicotero–led revival of the George Romero/Stephen King anthology format. Seasons premiered from 2019 onward; by Season 3 the show was averaging 1.2 million viewers per episode within its first seven days of streaming (AMC Networks Q3 2021 earnings call).
- Twelve Forever (Netflix, 2019) — An animated series aimed at older children and young teens. Picked up by Netflix after a development period at Cartoon Network. Ran one season of 25 episodes before cancellation — short enough to become a "lost gem" search query on Reddit forums by 2022.
- Untitled Entertainment Development Deal (2020) — A 10-picture co-production agreement that positioned Cartel as financier alongside Laura Notarianni's creative leadership at Untitled. This deal produced low-to-mid-budget genre features distributed through Tubi, Hallmark Movies & Mysteries, and international broadcast windows.
Merchandise With the Cartel Name On It — Or Around It
There is a specific kind of collector who tracks production company logos the way sneakerheads track Jordan colorways. They are fewer in number, but they exist — usually inside the overlap of three Venn diagram circles: horror fandom, indie comics readership, and physical media enthusiasts who still buy Blu-ray steelbooks. Cartel Entertainment landed squarely inside that overlap without necessarily planning a consumer-facing brand strategy around it.
The Creepshow license generated tangible merchandise during Cartel's involvement:
- Titan Books tie-in publications — including Creepshow: From Script to Scream, the official behind-the-scenes companion released in partnership with AMC Networks Publishing in 2022.
- Skybound tabletop games — A licensed board game called Creepshow: The Suspense-Building Game, produced by Skybound Tabletop in partnership with Cartel Entertainment and Greg Nicotero's Monster Agency Productions. Released fall 2024. Retail price: approximately $45 USD.
- Creepshow comic books (Image Comics/Skybound) — Ongoing series launched 2023. Variant covers commissioned from notable horror artists; Issue #1 CGC 9.8 graded copies traded in the $60–$95 range on eBay throughout 2024.
- Digital collectibles (VeVe platform) — Evoke Entertainment (post-rebrand) appears as an active licensor on VeVe, the New Zealand-based digital collectibles app founded in 2018 that hosts Marvel, DC, Disney, and Jim Henson Company NFTs. The presence signals ongoing IP monetization in Web3-adjacent spaces.
"The best production brands in genre entertainment do not sell to audiences — they sell to the people who build shrines."
— paraphrased from License Global's 2024 Special Report on Collectibles
A Quick Reference: Cartel Entertainment Properties and Collectible Footprint
| Property | Format | Collectible Types | Est. Collector Price Range |
|---|---|---|---|
| Creepshow TV series | TV / Streaming | Board game, BTS book, posters, signed scripts | $18 – $120 |
| Creepshow comics | Comic books | Variant covers, CGC graded slabs, signed editions | $6 – $95 (CGC 9.8) |
| Twelve Forever | Animated series | Fan art prints, discontinued DVD sets | $15 – $45 |
| Sharknado franchise | TV movies | Novelty merch, T-shirts, Funko-style figures (unofficial) | $10 – $35 |
| Evoke/Cartel digital assets | Web3 collectibles | VeVe NFTs, limited-edition drops | $5 – $200 (mint + secondary) |
| Prices approximate based on eBay completed listings and VeVe secondary market data, mid-2025. | |||
Licensing Architecture: How a Production Company Becomes a Brand Licensor
Most independent production companies never become licensors. They produce work-for-hire, take executive producer credits, cash their fees, and move on. The licensing layer — where your company name becomes a stamp that third-party manufacturers want to put on their packaging — requires owning or controlling intellectual property rights beyond just the initial distribution window.
Cartel Entertainment crossed that threshold through a combination of deliberate rights retention and accidental timing. The Sharknado connection, for instance, originated in Spry's pre-Cartel career; the cultural persistence of that franchise meant that by 2018, five years after the original aired, novelty merchandise bearing Sharknado-adjacent branding continued selling at conventions and online without a centralized merchandising strategy driving it. The brand had outgrown its origin point.
The Creepshow deal represented something more structured. Under the AMC/Shudder arrangement, Cartel's involvement included participation in ancillary revenue streams — meaning the Titan Books companion volume, the Skybound board game, and the Image Comics series all required clearance through Cartel's business affairs team. That placed the company in the position of a rights gatekeeper for a property with a forty-year heritage stretching back to the 1982 Romero-King film.
The Canadian Expansion and What It Signaled
In August 2018, The Hollywood Reporter covered Cartel opening a Canadian office — a move typical of production companies chasing tax incentive co-productions but unusual for a management-first firm. The Canadian presence enabled Cartel to qualify as a domestic co-production partner under CAVCO rules, which require Canadian producers to hold meaningful creative and financial control. This opened doors to CBC and Super Channel commissions, diversifying the company's portfolio beyond American cable and streaming buyers.
For collectors, this matters in ways that are easy to miss. Canadian co-productions often generate region-specific promotional materials — alternate poster art, festival screening programs, press kits printed in smaller runs. These items circulate in secondary markets without anyone cataloguing them as "Cartel Entertainment merchandise," yet they carry the provenance.
The Name Change That Tells You Where the Money Is Going
On December 12, 2024, Stan Spry told Deadline that the shift from Cartel to Evoke reflected a "forward-looking approach." Read between the lines: the word cartel, regardless of its etymological innocence in a business context, had become friction. Algorithms flag it. International distributors hesitate over it. Festival programmers in certain territories decline to print it on badges. A company expanding into consumer-facing collectibles — particularly digital collectibles on platforms subject to app store content policies — benefits enormously from a brand name that does not require explanation.
Evoke Entertainment retained all existing intellectual property positions. The VeVe licensor profile lists both names interchangeably. Collectors buying Creepshow-related items after January 2025 may encounter either branding depending on when manufacturing contracts were executed.
This transition mirrors a broader pattern in the entertainment licensing space. Between 2020 and 2025, at least fourteen mid-tier production entities restructured their IP holding arrangements to separate production operations from licensing and merchandising subsidiaries (License Global, "Top 150 Leading Licensors" report, 2025). The reason: licensing revenue carries higher margins and lower risk than production revenue, and investors price those cash flows differently.
Why Anyone Is Paying Ninety-Five Dollars for a Slabbed Creepshow Comic
The answer has very little to do with Cartel Entertainment specifically and almost everything to do with how horror IP behaves in the secondary collectibles market.
Horror properties occupy a distinct lane in physical memorabilia trading. Unlike superhero comics, where value correlates tightly with first appearances and key story events, horror collectibles trade heavily on aesthetic attachment — people buy Creepshow variants because they look good framed on a wall, not because issue #4 introduces a character who later appears in a Disney+ crossover. This means horror collectibles depreciate less steeply after initial hype peaks, because the buyer base is motivated by décor sentiment as much as speculation.
Cartel Entertainment's association with Creepshow places it adjacent to this dynamic without direct exposure to its volatility. The company does not manufacture comics or board games — Skybound handles that operational layer — but Cartel's rights position means that any expansion of the Creepshow merchandise catalog potentially routes revenue back through its licensing pipeline. For collectors watching early-stage production companies for potential appreciation of associated memorabilia, the Cartel/Evoke name represents a bet on whether the company continues accumulating culturally resonant horror and genre properties.
Three Collector Segments Watching This Space
- The Horror Completist — Buys every Creepshow variant cover regardless of artist or story content. Will purchase the Titan Books BTS book on release day. Less price-sensitive; highly sensitive to condition grading.
- The Physical Media Archivalist — Tracks production company involvement in releases to assemble "studio collections" — e.g., all films from A24, all television from Bad Robot. Cartel-associated titles appear in these collections inconsistently, primarily because the company rarely received prominent above-title card placement.
- The Digital Native — Active on VeVe; buys entertainment NFTs in the $8–$60 mint price range; resells on secondary market when multiples exceed 2x. More interested in Evoke-branded drops going forward than historical Cartel catalog.
Questions People Keep Asking
Is Cartel Entertainment the same company as Big Cartel?
No. Big Cartel is an e-commerce platform for independent artists and makers, founded in 2005 in Salt Lake City. There is no corporate relationship, shared ownership, or licensing connection between the two. The name overlap causes confusion at conventions and in online forum searches regularly enough that it has become a minor running joke among genre entertainment professionals.
Does Cartel Entertainment make the Creepshow TV show?
Partially. Cartel held a co-production position on Creepshow alongside the primary creative force, Greg Nicotero's KNB EFX and Monster Agency Productions, under AMC Networks/Shudder's commissioning. Showrunner credit belongs to Nicotero. Cartel's role centered on business affairs, packaging talent, and maintaining the property's licensing framework for ancillary products. Think of Cartel as the scaffolding the show was built on, not the architect who drew the blueprints.
Why did they change the name to Evoke Entertainment?
According to Stan Spry's statement in Deadline (December 2024), the partners wanted a name reflecting the company's evolving direction. Practically speaking, the word "cartel" creates predictable difficulties in international sales, algorithmic filtering, and consumer brand positioning. The rebrand preserved all existing IP holdings and partnership agreements.
Are Cartel Entertainment items worth collecting as investments?
With caveats: individual items tied to culturally durable horror properties like Creepshow hold value well because of aesthetic collector demand. The production company brand itself carries far less standalone recognition than comparable firms like Blumhouse or A24, meaning "Cartel Entertainment" as a label does not yet command a premium simply for being present on an item. If the company — now Evoke — accumulates additional high-profile genre properties, early Cartel-era memorabilia could appreciate by association. Today, the safer play is the underlying IP (Creepshow, Sharknado) rather than the production banner.
Where can I find Cartel Entertainment branded merchandise?
You generally cannot find merchandise explicitly branded "Cartel Entertainment" the way you might find A24-branded apparel. Instead, Cartel/Evoke-associated items circulate through the IP channels they helped produce: Skybound's webstore for Creepshow comics and games, Titan Books for companion volumes, VeVe for digital collectibles, and convention dealer tables for production ephemera like press kits and screening programs. Secondary market sites like eBay list Creepshow-related items frequently; searching "Cartel Entertainment" directly yields sparse results, while searching the individual property names returns hundreds of active listings.
The Quiet Brand in a Loud Room
Some entertainment companies engineer themselves toward visibility. A24 sells candles. Neon commissions limited-run theatrical posters from renowned illustrators. These are deliberate brand-building strategies executed by marketing teams who understand that a production company logo on a tote bag functions as a lifestyle signal.
Cartel Entertainment never pursued that lane, and whether the choice was philosophical or circumstantial probably depends on whom you ask inside the building. What they did accomplish — across thirteen years, dozens of productions, a cross-border expansion, and a rebrand executed with minimal fanfare — was embed their name into the supply chain of properties that other people obsess over. Horror fans who frame Creepshow pages in their living rooms may never learn that Cartel had a hand in making those pages possible. That is not failure. That is infrastructure.
The question for collectors now is whether infrastructure eventually gets recognized. When Criterion releases a boxed set of a show that Cartel helped produce — and that day is probably closer than anyone monitoring message boards realizes — the liner notes will carry the name. Some reader, somewhere, will flip to that page, recognize it, and open a new browser tab. That is how cult brands start. Not with a launch campaign, but with someone noticing a name they have seen before and deciding, finally, to ask what it means.
