Disney Is Making a Fortune and Safeguarding Its Future By Buying Childhood (economist.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Disney has been successful for the better part of a century. But they haven't always had to work as hard to do it. Over the past couple of decades, they've been facing more and better competition than ever before, and they've had to change their business strategy in response. An article at The Economist details this strategy, which seems to have a central theme: buy up things people loved as kids, and commercialize the hell out of them. The recent Star Wars film is the latest example — the marketing blitz around it (and its related merchandise) was a sight to behold. Disney is hoping that focusing investment on great content will protect them from the massive transitions underway in the content delivery part of the entertainment industry. "The biggest doubt is the durability of the model. It is not clear for how long such franchises can be stretched. And introducing new ones is a risk. John Carter, a film based on one of a series of novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs, flopped. Cinema-goers will also have far more choice as other firms try to establish or add to their franchises."

Comments

star wars has marketing?

[known_coward_69]

crazy back in the 80's it was as pure as the virgin mary. no tie in toys by Hasbro or Kenner. No tie in fast food. no lines to see ROTJ because of full page ads in the newspaper. George Lucas made the movies out of pure love of his fans

John Carter

[Ecuador]

Just to clarify, John Carter flopped only because it had dismal marketing. It was not a masterpiece, but it was certainly better than many other recent blockbusters and with any sort of semi-competent marketing it would have been a (minor or major I don't know) success. I mean (at least until close to release) they had some boring trailers that didn't even tell you obvious things like "from the author of Tarzan" "from the director of Wall E / Finding Nemo" etc.

Re:John Carter

[Anonymous Coward]

The title didn't help either. John Carter. Who?

They should have used the actual title, A Princess of Mars, or at the very least the working title they had which was John Carter of Mars.

John Carter failed on epically bad marketing

[damn_registrars]

Every trailer and commercial I saw for that movie came across with the message that I should already know who John Carter was. Hence as I had no idea I had no interest in the commercials, trailers, or the movie itself. I'm still not familiar with the character. They could have introduced it much better to get people to care about it; think of how Rambo: First Blood was able to get us to care about a new character for example. Instead they tried to get us to care about the character through brute force, those who didn't go for it just stayed away and the movie flopped.

Hell just a better title would have gone a long ways towards bringing in customers. Even Borat had enough of an extended title to give people some idea what they were getting in to or why they might want to see it.