The New York Post Goes to Hollywood: 225 Years of News Become IP

The New York Post has signed an agreement with Crazy Legs Productions to turn articles and material from its archive into films, series and documentaries.

Hollywood therefore continues to search for recognizable intellectual property, but this time it does not need comic books, toys or video games: 225 years of selected news will do.

Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid has signed a first-look partnership with Crazy Legs Productions, a CAA-represented company operating between Atlanta and Los Angeles. The agreement covers film, television and streaming projects drawn both from the newspaper’s enormous historical archive and from more recent stories, including those published by the new California Post.

The areas identified are true crime, pop culture and sports: genres in which a news story often already has protagonists, conflict, a twist and, when things go particularly well, even a third act.

From the newspaper to the development department: news changes markets

A first-look arrangement does not, of course, hand the Post’s entire archive over to Crazy Legs. It gives the company a privileged position from which to identify stories, develop them and turn them into audiovisual proposals.

Crazy Legs arrives prepared. Its catalog includes reality shows such as 1000-Lb Sisters, true-crime productions such as Tech Bro Murders and scripted films such as The Great Lillian Hall, the HBO film starring Jessica Lange and Kathy Bates.

The Post, for its part, owns exactly the kind of archive that such a production machine can easily metabolize: crimes, scandals, celebrities, athletes, sudden fortunes, equally rapid falls and characters who seem to have been written by a screenwriter before anyone even buys the rights.

Nor is this the first time the newspaper has tried to extend its brand beyond print.

In 2020, New York Post Entertainment collaborated with Investigation Discovery on Torn From the Headlines: New York Post Reports, built around criminal cases also recounted by the journalists who had covered them.

From the library to the algorithm: the Post turns the past into a filtered product

The New York Post is not a neutral container, but a tabloid with an established conservative editorial line, now part of the News Corp universe, with an aggressive and highly recognizable editorial tradition. In October 2024 it went so far as to officially endorse Donald Trump over Kamala Harris, calling him the preferable choice for the future of the country.

The most significant coincidence, however, comes from artificial intelligence. On August 11 the group launched Hamilton, a system built on Google’s Gemini technology that allows users to query content from the New York Post and the California Post, receive personalized summaries, recommendations and updates built around their interests.

Within a few weeks, the same editorial heritage is therefore being treated in two economically complementary ways: as an archive to be queried through AI and as a narrative catalog to be turned into films and series.

In both cases, the value no longer lies only in the news itself, but in its ability to be selected, recombined and resold: the Post is now monetizing the filter through which the past was constructed and will be retold.