(2 of 2)
"More so this holiday season than any past year, we're seeing a level of year-end merchandising that's highly unusual," says Brad Globe, head of consumer products for Amblin/Dreamworks. "It's a testament to how big movie licensing has become." Other contenders this December include--perhaps inevitably--two films about toys: 20th Century Fox's Jingle All the Way, which tells the Christmas Eve story of a father who can't find a TV-based action figure for his son, and Disney's Toy Story, which is being given an especially big push to coincide with its video release because Disney--this may surprise anyone who's visited a Disney store in the past year--felt it had underestimated the marketing possibilities when the film was released in theaters last fall. So children can now beg for real toys based on semi-satiric fake toys, a postmodernish irony probably neither they nor their parents will appreciate.
To a great extent, of course, the success of a movie's merchandise depends on the success of the movie itself--kids won't eat the cereal of a movie they, and more importantly their friends, haven't seen. At the same time, box-office success does not always guarantee merchandising success--analysts cite Casper and Independence Day as two recent hit movies that disappointed their licensees. Much depends on how "toyetic" a movie is, in industry parlance, and the degree to which merchandise is sympatico with the film. Flipper licensed a camping set, "which is pretty funny," says director Shapiro, "because dolphins aren't usually found in the forest."
"Not every film is a great merchandising opportunity," says Pat Wyatt, president of licensing for Fox. And not all spin-offs are aimed at junior. Estee Lauder, for instance, is currently marketing a line of makeup called the Face of Evita. But the best bets for merchandising, according to Wyatt, are family films with a strong fantasy element. In toy terms, "creatures do better than representations of people because kids can project a broader fantasy into their play." A more practical problem with human-based toys is getting actors to sign off on their likenesses; another is getting the likenesses right in the first place--a difficulty exemplified by Space Jam's Michael Jordan figurines, whose goofy-fierce look is more evocative of Anthony Mason. Even Wyatt admits that the action figures based on Bill Pullman and Jeff Goldblum in Fox's Independence Day were "kind of beefy."
Because of the nature of the business--it generally takes about a year to design and manufacture a toy and then ship it all the way from Asia, where it is typically made--the battle lines for next summer are already drawn. Hasbro, a licensee for The Lost World, a Jurassic Park sequel, even persuaded the filmmakers to incorporate what promises to be an extremely toyetic dino-chasing truck into the film's plot--a nifty cart indeed.
--With reporting by Georgia Harbison/New York and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles