We don’t often see outlandish movie tie-ins nowadays, and it truly is a crying shame. Long gone are the glory days of the mid-eighties and nineties when movies transcended the silver screen.
During what was undoubtedly a golden era for questionable merchandising you could walk straight out of the cinema into your local supermarket and pick up your Gremlins breakfast cereal that even included a pack of stickers with stills from the 1984 blockbuster.
What’s more, those brainy marketing execs at Warner Bros. also ingeniously invented an incredibly catchy jingle for their television ads that I’m sure remains in the back of everyone who grew up in the eighties collective minds: “Gremlins, Gremlins, bite after bite. What a tasty way to satisfy your Gremlin appetite”
Of course, Steven Spielberg’s Gremlins wasn’t the first and only media property to take an unceremonious step into another domain in the name of cross-promotion and extra income.
The good – Milking your intellectual property the right way
If you’re looking for a shining example on how to squeeze the most money out of a movie away from the cinema screen itself, then look no further than the ‘House of Mouse’. Disney has most certainly led the way since day one.
Just take this excerpt from a 1994 New York Times article shortly following the release of The Lion King to see how it’s done: “The Burger King at the corner of La Brea Avenue and Sunset Boulevard on the edge of Hollywood is usually dead on Sundays. But in recent weeks the staff has hardly had time to sweep the kitchen floor.
“Since the store hung cartoon banana leaves from the ceiling and began packing its kids meals with toy characters from Disney’s new animated film, The Lion King, its Sunday sales have doubled and increases during the week have been even more spectacular.”
Not only did Disney generate a huge number of ticket sales thanks to putting inexpensive plastic toys in the hands of children across the globe, but it has since been estimated that this one film alone made a staggering $1 billion from merchandising which included clothing, food, video games, day-to-day necessities such as toothbrushes and lunchboxes and most lucratively, plush toys.
It comes as no surprise to see some of film’s greatest franchises are up there when it comes to movies that made more money from merchandising than at the box office, these include: Avengers, Harry Potter, Jurassic Park, Transformers, Cars and Toy Story.
Whilst we still see plenty of movie merchandise aimed at children from big money studios such as Disney, Marvel and Warner Bros, one quick look online and it’s quite clear that marketers are targeting millennials with collectible items such as Funko Pop! figures and branded clothing, a trend that will only grow as people continue to pine for childhood comforts.
The bad – Tie-in terrors that still haunt us to this day
Of course, it’s not all money and success. If you’re a fan of video games you’ll be well aware that movie tie-ins with video games have never worked successfully side-by-side.
The most famous case of a movie flopping spectacularly away from the big screen is the case of poor old ET, everyone’s favourite extra terrestrial.
In 1982 Atari developed and published ‘E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial’ for the Atari 2600 console, the premise of the game was simple… Help E.T. collect three pieces of an interplanetary telephone that will help him contact his home planet.
It seemed nobody wanted to help E.T. get home… Despite being one of the most successful films of the 1980’s, this game was cited as the biggest commercial failure in video game history.
Rushed in just 5 weeks in order to hit the shelves in time for Christmas, every aspect of this game failed spectacularly. In the end it’s estimated that up to 3.5 million unsold copies of the game were buried in the New Mexico desert, as nobody else would have them.
Famously, this disaster was blamed for the eventual demise of Atari, as the company was plunged into debt the following year, consigning them to the history books forever more.
There have been plenty of shameless attempts at monetising things that simply didn’t need to have branding slapped on them over the years, these include: Star Wars – The Dark Side Roast Coffee, a $799 Star Trek burial urn and Twilight and Watchmen officially licensed condoms. We’re sure nothing sets the mood quite like taking a Twilight themed condom out of your wallet.
The ugly – So strange that we can barely believe it
Whilst we’re very skeptical about that Star Trek burial urn, there are much weirder products that have been pushed over the years that deserve a mention.
Despite being flat out bizzare, in what turned out to be a marketing masterstroke, Belgian fast food chain Quick went viral in 2012 during the re-release of the infamous Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.
The popular restaurant captured the attention of millions around the world when they released a new burger that proudly sat inbetween two jet-black burger buns. They called this monstrosity the Darth Vader burger, despite being absolutely awful, this sith inspired meal was a commercial success thanks to the attention it received online.
As we all know, sci-fi and fantasy movies are a licensing dream, so marketable are the characters and so avid are their fans that you can add a brand name to anything and strangely it’ll succeed, no matter how odd… Take Conan the Barbarian for example. Earlier this month world-renowned slot game developers NetEnt released Conan Video Slot across the internet, despite being such an odd fit in the eyes of many, the game has quickly been picked up by a host of casinos.
Other examples of nightmare-inducing licensed products include an Edward Cullen Mallow, which is a life-sized human shaped pillow with the Twilight’s star face printed on the head, James Bond ice lollies that had you lick Daniel Craig’s naked upper torso and an ill-fated 2003 Matrix themed mobile phone from Samsung that was preloaded with Matrix references.
Where has all the merch gone?
It’s no secret that we just don’t see this level of tat anymore, this is likely due to the rise in digital media… It’s so much easier for Marvel to release a mobile game filled with microtransactions and loot boxes than it is to put a box of Iron Man or Hulk themed cereal onto our shelves.
It’s fair to say we greatly miss the age of movie tie-ins, however, in a day and age in which marketers are clambering over each other to go viral, perhaps someone will take a chance once more… We can only hope.
