The majority of focus for the past few weeks in class and in our own discussion has been ancillary markets. For this week's blog post, we will simply walk you through a selection of our ancillary products and our reasoning behind these products. Before we get in to specifics though, we should clarify our intended audience. By releasing our film on Father's Day weekend 2013, we hope to draw two key demographs, younger and older men. The tropes of the story seem to build perfectly into these two demographs by uniting the characters of a golden age with a newer audience. As well the fact that there is constant over the top action and jokes about Uranus insists a more “masculine” audience. As well, I should mention that everything here is still in a tentative state. No final decisions have been made as of yet.
The first product that comes to mind when thinking about Superhero films is, with little doubt, action figures. Early on in the year, we threw around the idea of action figures as a primary ancillary product for a few reasons. Firstly, the comic book industry and film industry are markets that highly reward collectors. Comic book readers are natural collectors because of the serial nature of the medium, and film viewers prize inter-continuity between works from the same universe. The two markets, united, seem to be a perfect fit for the toy industry as an ancillary. For this characteristic as well, we have decided to release two separate toy lines. The first, “Agents of Atlas: The Golden Era” will focus on just that. Each character will be presented in his or her original form, exemplified in the origin comics. The second, “Agents of Atlas: Rise of the Yellow Claw” will be directly linked to the film. Each character will be recreated as they have been portrayed in the first of our film series. There could, as well, be future action figure lines tied to the films sequels. By providing the audience with two toy lines, we effectively double our chances of making a sale. A collector who intends to buy only one action figure may need to choose between several different lines. By providing two lines, there is a higher choice of him purchasing from ours. As well, those collectors who simply MUST own everything will be purchasing twice as much from us.
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| A good starting point for the "Rise of the Yellow Claw" line of action figures. |
The second product that we discussed was the tie-in video game. In deciding what type of video game we wanted to provide, and how closely we wanted it to mirror the film, we looked to other Marvel video game adaptations. We decided to employ a similar strategy to two video game franchises that have already succeeded in the Marvel universe: Activision's X-Men Legends and Marvel: Ultimate Alliance. Both of these franchises allow the player to control up to four characters at a time, allowing for “on the fly” change in action. Each character would perform differently in different situations. For example, M-11 might come in handy when hacking a computer terminal, where Venus could subdue large numbers of enemies. A large advantage to this four player structure, which has been capitalized on in Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2, is the ability to perform co-op attacks. In this way, we could recreate some of the most iconic panels from the graphic novel for a gamer. In terms of story, we intend to build the game around an expanded version of the graphic novel's narrative. The majority of this expansion would come during the several panels where the Agents infiltrate and overthrow several Atlas facilities. This structure would allow the player to feel involved in the plot of the movie, but also expand the story without interfering with continuity.
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| A highly popular game franchise, and also highly rated by consumers. |
Finally, we talked about possible DVD/Blu-Ray details. For this market, we once again looked to the collectable nature of superhero products. As you have seen in a previous blog post, we explored the number of products that were presented by Watchmen. While we don't intend to go as far as Watchmen did, we do still want to provide a number of options for consumers. We do intend to release the film on both a standard and special edition DVD and Blu-Ray edition, presuming the DVD market has not all but disappeared by 2013. As well, we discussed a possible combo-pack with the upcoming Avengers movie. As far as special features go, we discussed the basic fare; director and cast commentary, a “making-of” documentary, and basic character information slides. However, on the special edition DVD and Blu-Ray, we intend to include a series of animated shorts based on each character's origins, similar to Watchmen: The Motion Comic. This will give incentive to those who don't necessarily know the characters well to buy the special edition DVD or Blu-Ray. We intend to discuss other possible bonus features even further.
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