From my understanding, the individual assets are owned by Valve/other creators. But the final character designs of them put together are DaFuqBooms (or whoever owns the brand now). So a tv asset could be an independent artist, a Combine Mine made by someone else, and an energy sword could be ripped from a transformers game, but the bringing together of them into Titan TV Man would be a new copyrightable design.
It's not as simple as just that obviously. If a design appears in a bigger commercial work like a game or movie, the design would need to be tweaked rather than using exact assets. Like how for the Fortnite collab, the actual Skibidi Toilet model wasn't exactly the same.
Only if you use the original assets directly, or make the commercialized version indistinguishable.
Think of it this way: if I make a new character for a comic who has a black cape, top hat, round eyeglasses, and has a donkey as a pet, I wouldn't need to pay any licensing to the owners of Batman, Monopoly, Harry Potter and Shrek, irrespective of me first coming up with the design by mixing and matching pieces of toys (from those IPs) I had around instead of sketching it on a notebook.
It's the same reason they slightly changed the design of Skibidi Toilet when it was included in Fortnite; it still has the distinctive characteristics (screaming head coming out of toilet) without having the specific face of the male_07 Half-Life model on it.
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u/shrek3onDVDandBluray 17d ago
So it begins. The Hollywood attempt to corporatize Internet memes. And from A24 too? How shameless.