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May 12, 2008 Will IRON MAN dominate the Superhero Planet?
Marvel Comics had to take the risk. It has been years of licensing its superheroes for extremely successful films made by other studios—Spider-man for Sony, or the X-Men franchise for Fox—, without really profiting from them. They are a small 486 million-a-year comic book company, that did not have the know-how and the money, so they went for a $525 million credit line, made distribution arrangement with Paramount that allows it to keep a hefty piece of the profits, and launched their first superhero movie: Iron Man.
Looks good, but will they be able to make a business success out of it? Three things will be critical for achieving it: 1. Product quality Marvel Comics was really aware of the first one. They had to make something big out of it, so they took well-known actors (Robert Downey and Gwyneth Paltrow to start with), made an agreement with George Lucas for producing the special effects and came up with solid and entire movie (no chance to make a full story divided into different delivered movies such as Kill Bill!). First step taken! The second one, the Rum up, was not that easy. As it happens with most of product launches, attaining a proper rump up from the beginning is essential. For if you do not get it at the very beginning it is very difficult and expensive to reach it later. They also seemed to know this, for they ran a holistic communication campaign in the USA, which seems to have worked: Box office in the USA is close to 200 million US$ so far. Second step seems to be in the right way! And finally, we reach to the most critical point from a financial point of view: Exploitation of the Iron Man rights. As I explained in the post “The Kingdom of Shrek”, where the real money lies is not in the movie in itself but in the marketing activities around it. Especially in the Licensing for Toys, DVDs, Videogames, Books and Goodies for the superhero.
Some of these can already be found (take for instance the Iron Man Videogame for the PS3 or the fantastic product placement of Audi in the film), but much is still left for financing the160 million US$ that film has cost! Let’s see what happens. I have personally found the film superb, but I presume that we will only see a second version if the marketing and licensing around the movie are properly managed Think Different!!! Ignacio Gafo PS: Manuel you are very welcome to share with us the detail of the Communication Campaign :o)
Posted on 12 May 2008 in Product Management, International Marketing CommentsI only see one big mistake with all this: Time to market. This month we also have Indiana Jone's last film and in summer we'll see the return of Nolan's Batman: The Dark Knight. Both are gonna be more eye catcher than this superproduction... Also in summer arrives Star Wars "cartoon" movie. In a near future, we obviously will see a sequel...and maybe then they will have more chances to sucess in all levels. Posted by: Ibai at May 13, 2008 04:43 PM You could be right Ibai about the time to market. However, I am not sure that they had a better chance: Christmas was not a choice with so many fantasy films + the rest of the year has been packed with very good films so far. What I am still missing is more merchandising. Box office is doing really well thru the World, but that will not be enough to make it really profitable! Posted by: jose ignacio gafo at May 19, 2008 09:47 PM Post a comment |
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