Back when George Lucas was making the first Star Wars film, he had the chance to negotiate for an additional $150K from Fox Studios, since American Graffiti had been a success at the box office. Instead, he left that money on the table, in return for licensing and merchandizing rights. At the time, it probably seemed like a weird decision to industry observers.<\/p>\n
But of course he went on to parlay that move into a fundamental restructuring of the way movies are monetized. It’s hard to believe that before 1977, the whole concept of making a fortune through toys, T-shirts, novelizations, etc. wasn’t really on the radar. Now, like it or not, we live in the world that George created. Revenue from these sources has earned hundreds of millions for Lucasfilm.<\/p>\n
Today a friend sent me a link to a video in which the chief creative officer of Sphero is interviewed as he demonstrates their computer-controlled toy version of the new Star Wars robot (if you’ve seen any of the trailers, that robot is in the very first shot). Watching this video, I was struck by how completely the concept of “owning the character” has seeped into the DNA of big budget sci-fi movies.<\/p>\n
He talks about his childhood, and how he and his colleagues grew up watching the Star Wars films. Then he says, talking about Sphero’s development of the toy: “For us it was a chance to make the character that we always wanted to buy.”<\/p>\n
Something about this sentence jumped out at me. It seemed oddly off, as though some essential concept had been misplaced. I spent some time today trying to figure out what, exactly, was bothering me.<\/p>\n
And then I had it. It was the way his description had completely erased the line between the magic of seeing a movie character and the concept of buying one. As though they were one and the same thing.<\/p>\n
But they are not the same thing at all. No matter how commercial all of this gets, a little kid goes to the movies not to engage in a commercial transaction, but to visit exciting new worlds, where they hope to encounter wondrous characters and stories.<\/p>\n
And that, my friends, is precisely what is ingenious about the monetization strategy that George Lucas pretty much invented: After little kids go to the movies, they don’t buy toys and other merchandise.<\/p>\n
Their parents do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Back when George Lucas was making the first Star Wars film, he had the chance to negotiate for an additional $150K from Fox Studios, since American Graffiti had been a success at the box office. Instead, he left that money on the table, in return for licensing and merchandizing rights. At the time, it probably … Continue reading “$150K”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16851"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16851"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16851\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16852,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16851\/revisions\/16852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16851"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16851"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16851"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}