Truemors
is reporting from
Member
NP Rank:
NP Rank:
Speed Racer: Coming Soon to a Happy Meal Near You
Share: 
by Jordan Yerman | January 26, 2008 at 10:16 am
2044 views | 0 Recommendations | 1 comment
Videos
Photos
Joel Silver, most known for less-family-friendly fare such as The Matrix (also with the Wachowski Brothers), is getting his crack at merchandise tie-in Nirvana with the upcoming Speed Racer.
Tie-in merchandise serves an important purpose to the studios: such marketing targets the ideal audience member, who, in the case of a G-rated movie, is not necessarily the ticket-buyer. Your movie will be front-of-mind if it's on the things that kids see every day: not necessarily websites or television ads, but fast-food containers, cereal boxes, and other consumables.
"Speed Racer," the actioner throttling into theaters May 9, is targeting a G rating. What's more, Silver not only gets his cover of Cheerios -- he gets a McDonald's Happy Meal, Hot Wheels cars and Lego playsets.Warner Bros. will need all the help it can get.
In a year when the studio is launching the next installments of the "Batman" and "Harry Potter" franchises, it's hoping that the lesser-known "Speed Racer" can blast through the checkered flag at the box office and become worthy of sequels as well.
But the family-friendly entry, based on the Japanese anime series of the 1960s, and helmed by the Wachowskis (who worked with Silver on "The Matrix" trilogy) faces a fiercely competitive summer session, bowing just a week after another franchise-hopeful, "Iron Man."
So the studio has enlisted a lengthy lineup of promotional partners that will pony up at least $80 million in additional marketing support around the film.
That kind of backing from brands like General Mills, McDonald's, Target, Mattel, Lego, Topps and Esurance, among others, will create the "noise" needed to gets auds interested in the pic, Silver says.
"You have to open big," he says. "You have to let them know you're out there. The only way to make a lot of noise is to have people shout from the rooftops. ('Speed Racer') was an opportunity to do something we've never done before."
I remember as a child when the new movie stuff would hit the scene: fast-food tie-ins were just starting to happen. My family ended up with glasses promoting The Black Hole (made from actual glass, though rather fragile in the dishwasher and in the hands of a six-year-old), and plastic cups displaying characters from The Empire Strikes Back. I loved all that stuff, until I got a bit older. then I just started caring about whether or not the movie itself was going to be any good.
What is NowPublic?
NowPublic lets people work together to cover news events around the world.
Crowd Power
These members have powered this story:
Jordan Yerman
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
airventure
Cuba City, Wisconsin, United States
Well Wisher
Nellysford, Virginia, United States
Most RecentMost Recommended Comments (1)
at 16:19 on January 30th, 2008
I know when I was a kid, a prize in the box was all I needed to get me to want the box. Box of food, box of popcorn, box of anything. Of course, I assert the prizes were so much better back then and they were almost free of movie connections. Nowadays the way they sell a movie is not with the plot but with the toys. Get the kids to like it and their parents have to take them, so you get money from the kids, of which there are usually several and the parents who have to take them. And buy them all the stuff that goes along with it. What was the movie about, again? This was one photo of many taken at a yard sale in Virginia, near where I live. While I have a small spot reserved for the idea and the occasional toy that was actually around when I was buying these meals, I think most of it is sort of useless, not made very well and lack imagination on part of the marketers.
Well Wisher has contributed a photo to this story.