Wall Street Journal on Star Wars and Toy Aisles
I shared a Wall Street Journal video over the weekend, and today I’d like to direct your attention to a new article posted at the site yesterday: ‘Star Wars’ Is a Force in Stores’ Toy Aisles, in which I see that sales estimates are now at $2 billion for Star Wars toys during the last four months of this year. $2 billion in Star Wars toys in four months? Wow.
The article discusses the decline in some brands’ space at retail as Star Wars takes over toy aisles, and the team behind the Peanuts brand even reports that Star Wars has affected their own sales forecasts. (Though word is the film isn’t great, which very likely also had a serious negative impact on Peanuts merchandise sales.)
“Iconix Brand Group Inc., which controls the license to the newest animated Charlie Brown movie, this month cut its sales outlook from “Peanuts†licenses by $24 million for the year largely because it miscalculated how many Snoopy dolls and other “Peanuts†products retailers would buy.”
Disney controls a significant portion of the entertainment industry these days, but I hope they’re going to be careful with Star Wars so that they don’t burn things out too fast. If they follow the path they’ve been taking with Marvel we may see Star Wars spike too soon and then collapse; but even a Star Wars collapse will have it as one of the largest brands in the world so there’s not much risk we’ll see a repeat of the late eighties.
The wsj.com article may not be accessible to you unless you have a wsj.com subscription.
I might suggest that while Star Wars has probably had an impact on Peanuts merchandise, there are probably some other factors too (at least over here):
*Peanuts has solely been running in re-run form since 2000, after Charles Schulz’s passing — there’s potentially a lot of the target audience who have no idea who Snoopy is! The TV specials are not really a holiday tradition over here in the way they seem to be in the U.S., though the movies used to get shown from time to time.
*Merchandise has not been particularly easy to come by over here. This may change a bit closer to the release date — it’s not out till January 2016 over here — but all I’ve seen so far are pseudo-Beanie Babies, Funko POPs and some high-end collectibles for adults. None of them were movie-specific, either.
Nonetheless, I’m very excited about seeing it. I was a huge Peanuts fan as a kid and it will be great to see it make a bit of a return in the public’s consciousness 🙂
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