Funko leadership fires Mondo founders, ending pop culture’s best poster-maker

Funko has cut about half the staff — including the co-founders — of Mondo, the Austin, Texas-based collection company that owns Funko acquired less than a year agoaccording to two reports and additional sources.

The layoffs mark the end of a nearly two-decade span for founders Rob Jones and Mitch Putnam, whose company was best known for alternative movie posters, vinyl music albums and other collectibles that tap into some of pop culture’s deepest fandoms. The cover And Gizmodo both reported the layoffs Friday afternoon; sources close to the case confirmed the details of both reports to Polygon.

Mondo was founded in 2004 as a t-shirt making subsidiary of the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema chain. It became known for its stylized reinventions of movie posters, beginning with the showings of several classics at the Alamo Drafthouse. A decade later, licensing deals with Lucasfilm and Disney established Mondo as the leading poster maker; numerous top artists came by to work with Mondo.

Many of those artists were outraged by the unceremonious termination of Mondo’s leadership and vowed not to work with what’s left for Funko.

The Wrap reported that Funko has “killed off the poster division” of Mondo, leaving its toy and vinyl record divisions behind. And those two could still be in danger, The Wrap said.

At the beginning of the month, Funko reported significant losses in its quarterly reporting to investors. That included writing off about $30 million (retail value) worth of big-headed figurines it couldn’t sell and send them to the landfill.