Hollywood is being swept by a fascination with toys as source material for movies, as movies based on toys soar at the box office and star vehicles hit a rough patch in 2009.
A “Wall Street Journal” article is a delicious combination of funny and serious about this film development and movie marketing trend.
“Toys now are receiving the same A-list treatment that any bankable movie star here has come to expect,” notes the “WSJ” article by Lauren A. E. Schuker. “That includes top billing and contracts with special perks. They even have their own talent agents.”
Among the toys and board games becoming films or in advanced development are (in no particular order) Risk, Big Wheel, Barbie, Asteroids, Candy Land, Monopoly, Battleship, Etch A Sketch and Mr. Potato Head. Hasbro, which owns Mr. Potato Head, has its own office on the Universal Studios lot with a six-foot statue of the spud in front of its building.
Such properties come with built-in brand awareness for any film offshoots, which the book “Marketing to Moviegoers: Second Edition” says is a help to film marketing although not a panacea. Basing a film on a well-known source property allows marketers to skip some context explanation and jump forward to flogging specific promotable elements of the movie. Toy based films have been big hits including “Transformers” and “G.I. Joe.”
“Some of Hollywood’s top directors and actors are eager to hitch their names to films starring a toy,” says the “WSJ” article. “Will Smith, who currently commands one of the biggest paychecks in the industry, signed on with partner James Lassiter to produce a movie based on the board game Risk, for Sony Corp.’s Sony Pictures.”
Comic books are another fertile ground for source material and Walt Disney Co. is even going as far as recently agreeing to buy Marvel Comics – which was in bankruptcy not too many years ago — for $4 billion.
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