[more January IP blogging]
I
noticed this box of cereal the other day while shopping. My first
thought was they are still squeezing money out of a 50 year old film
and the image of a star who has been dead since 2016
[Next to a box of cereal featuring sixty year old cartoon characters, but that's a topic for another post.]
The
example was even more striking after I did a little research. This
wasn't just a fifty-year-old film; it was a fifty-year-old
flop.
The idea for adapting the book into a film came about when director Mel Stuart's ten-year-old daughter read the book and asked her father to make a film out of it, with "Uncle Dave" (producer David L. Wolper,
who was not related to the Stuarts) producing it. Stuart showed the
book to Wolper, who happened to be in the midst of talks with the Quaker Oats Company regarding a vehicle to introduce a new candy bar from its Chicago-based Breaker Confections subsidiary (since renamed the Willy Wonka Candy Company and sold to Nestlé).
Wolper persuaded the company, which had no previous experience in the
film industry, to buy the rights to the book and finance the picture for
the purpose of promoting a new Quaker Oats "Wonka Bar".
...
Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory remained in obscurity
in the years immediately following its original release. When the
distribution rights lapsed in 1977, Paramount declined to renew,
considering it not viable. The rights defaulted back to the Quaker Oats Company, which was no longer involved in the film business, and therefore sold them to Warner Bros. for $500,000.
Wolper engineered the rights sale to Warner, where he became a
corporate director after selling his production company to it the
previous year.
By the 1980s, the film had experienced an increase in popularity
due to repeated television broadcasts, and gained cult status with a new
audience in home video sales. In 1996, there was a 25th anniversary theatrical re-release which grossed the film a further $21 million. In 2003, Entertainment Weekly ranked it 25th in the "Top 50 Cult Movies" of all time.
The tunnel scene during the boat ride has been cited as one of the
scariest in a film for children, for its surreal visuals, and was ranked
No. 74 on Bravo's The 100 Scariest Movie Moments. The scene has also been interpreted as a psychedelic trip, though director Stuart denied that was his intention.
...
Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory was released by Paramount Pictures
on June 30, 1971. The film was not a big success, eventually earning
$4 million worldwide on a budget of $3 million, and was the 24th
highest-grossing film of the year in North America.
A
few important points here both about the business of entertainment and
about why most of the coverage of that business is so bad.
First
off, every story of this industry is an IP story, both in who owns it
and the curve of its money-making potential. Warner picked up the
rights to this film for what was, even at the time, a song. Since then
it has grown far more profitable and, to point out the obvious, that's
all gravy. You don't need to spend any money on production or acquiring
rights and, in a sense, its advertising budget is negative since you
get paid for product placements to keep it in the public eye.
As
we've discussed before, certain intellectual property has legs. It will
continue to produce, often becoming even more popular, for decades
after its creation. It is no coincidence that every few years armies of
lobbyists from Disney and other big media companies descend upon
Washington to get Congress to push back the expiration dates on
copyrights.
Certain properties remain
culturally relevant seemingly forever, and that relevance translates to
multiple streams of revenue. They will be sold directly, remade or
covered, streamed, licensed, and will serve as the basis for derivative
works.
Universal's Frankenstein is over ninety
years old and you will still see Jack Pierce's copyrighted makeup every Halloween. At the height of the pandemic, people watched over a billion
hours of the Andy Griffith Show, a series that ran from 1960 to 1968. Artists are constantly covering the
songs of Hank Williams, a songwriter who died seventy years ago.
Frankenstein, The Andy Griffith Show, and Hank Williams catalog were all
enormously profitable at the time (Griffith was the number one show in the country the year it went off the air), but all ended up making far more
money afterwards.
Looping back to the original
subject, one place where one frequently finds IP with legs is the
children's market. Kids are voracious consumers of media, have an
extraordinary tolerance for repetition, and are frequently not all that
discerning. Better yet, if your target audience is any age band Under
10, every few years it will completely refresh itself so you can just
haul out the same old product. In one notorious example, Hanna-Barbera would
crank out a single season of shows like The Jetsons, Johnny Quest, or
Space Ghost and then run them in constant rotation on Saturday mornings
for decades.
Television basically created the
children's market, but it was home media that cranked it into high gear.
I remember an interview with Robert Altman where the director of films
like mash, McCabe and Mrs Miller, Nashville, and the Player said the
film that had made him the most money was Popeye.
Journalists
covering the streaming industry, particularly East Coast based
journalists, have done an embarrassingly bad job with the IP aspect of
the industry, which is probably the single worst thing they could screw
up. Disney and Warners lost billions saturating the market with
expensive shows that provided little incremental value -- how many
additional subscribers do you think the $150 to 200 million investment in Moon Knight brought in? - - while the
majority of viewers were there for their already incredibly rich
catalogs. At the same time, these journalists did a piss poor job
reporting on which "Originals" Netflix actually owned the
rights to and, perhaps more importantly, how few of the shows that they
did on had any kind of legs.
No comments:
Post a Comment