News
Uni Pacts For Film Based On Hasbro Games
July 1, 2008 -- Traditional toys company Hasbro is pumping up its Hollywood movie ambitions, reports the Wall Street Journal. The company formed a joint venture with Universal Pictures to bring its popular board games to the silver screen.
Its games with potential are Monopoly, Candy Land and Ouija. Hasbro’s properties include Clue, which was made into an unsuccessful 1985 theatrical from Paramount that grossed a paltry $14.6 million in the U.S. and Canada.
Notes the WSJ article by Joseph Pereira: “In traditional arrangements, toy companies pay a royalty to the film studio for the rights to make toys in the likeness of characters -- as Hasbro recently did in a deal with Iron Man, the Marvel Entertainment Inc. superhero firm distributed by Viacom Inc.'s Paramount Pictures. In its board-game movie arrangement, however, Hasbro is licensing the rights to the name, characters and themes of its board games to Universal, which pays for the production and gets the box-office receipts. Hasbro gets the toy tie-ins and rebates a small part of the sales to Universal. Little upfront money changes hands.”
Hasbro, which is the number two ranked toy company after Mattel, has two films in the Hollywood pipeline based on its toys. They are G.I. Joe movie made by Paramount and Transformers II from DreamWorks SKG, which Paramount distributes.
Notes the article: “In a toy industry squeezed by bigger players in videogames and other forms of electronic entertainment, movie tie-ins have been among Hasbro's better performers. Last year toys and playsets linked to such action flicks as Transformers, Star Wars and Spiderman” rang up nearly $1 billion in sales -- accounting for more than a quarter of the company's $3.8 billion in revenue.”
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