In a galaxy (not so) far, far, away, oranges, make-up and towels all have something in common. With the new Star Wars movie coming out, their marketing team has been hard at work to sell all the tickets they can. In trying to reach this goal, they have attempted to advertise their movie, but is the advertising too much?
If you have watched TV since November, you’ve probably seen one of the many advertisements they have for Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Some of these advertisements include the Gogurt advertisement, where the kid is using his Gogurt stick as a lightsaber, the Dodge commercial, with a black Dodge Viper leading a pack of other white Dodge vehicles and the Subway commercial, where the couple walks into the restaurant filled with Star Wars characters.
If you live under a rock and have not watched TV since November, then you have most likely been out shopping for groceries or out to the mall. In this case, then you would notice all the items that have some type of Star Wars related picture on them. In the supermarkets you might see grapes with Yoda on them, oranges with BB-8 around them and apples with Darth Vader plastered on the outside.
With all this advertising you’d think they’d be losing money in the race to become the top grossing movie of all time. Whether or not this is too much advertising, it seems to be working for them as they climb the boards to try and overthrow the current leader, Avatar.
Star Wars has made $1.5 billion, which puts the movie in fourth place of all time, right below Jurassic World in third, Titanic in second and Avatar in first. They have achieved this amount since December 18, which is less than a month, and gives them the honor of being the fastest movie to reach 1 billion dollars. Another record that this movie has broken is that, they have made the most money domestically in the United States, ever, and have almost reached 800 million dollars.
In the big picture of making the most money, however, their paycheck may not be coming from the box office. Star Wars merchandise is all the rage in toy stores and supermarkets all the same. With expectations saying it will make over five billion dollars in the next 12 months, the main income to make up their $200 million budget will be from the franchise, not the theaters.
With all the advertising to get to this amount of profit, they had to spend some money. Right now, the total amount spent is somewhere above 66 million dollars and climbing. Some have spectated that “Disney’s Star Wars practically markets itself” and the amount of talk going on in the public before it came out would back up this statement. With this fact, why spend all the money on marketing?
Marketing has actually helped the movie out greatly. With all the people watching these advertisements, it’s practically impossible to forget about the movie. You forget it for one second while watching your favorite show, but then the first commercial is the Cheerios Star Wars advertisement. “With the movie always in their minds, people are bound to see it more than once, which makes it more money and grows them close to their goal of being “king of the world.”