101 MOVIE TIE-INS

By BRUCE HANDY

Here's a telling story about the way the movie business used to work. In 1929 Walt Disney was approached in a New York City hotel lobby by a man offering $300 for the right to put Mickey Mouse's image on writing tablets. Disney, who needed the money, accepted on the spot. And thus in an altogether offhand manner was born the first officially licensed piece of Mickey Mouse junk.

Here's a telling story about the way the movie business works today. Last year, after shooting was completed on Flipper, which Universal was expecting to be one of its big summer movies for 1996, writer-director Alan Shapiro was approached by the studio's merchandising department. The executives had a problem: there were only three characters in the film suitable for licensing to stuffed-animal makers--Flipper, Scar the Hammerhead Shark and Pete the Pelican. Toy manufacturers were demanding a fourth to round out the Flipper line. "But the movie's been shot," Shapiro argued. "It's too late to add a fourth character." Nevertheless, Shapiro and the executives screened a rough cut of the film and noticed a montage sequence during which a sea turtle swam by. And thus in an altogether calculated manner was born Sam the Turtle. His likeness flooded toy stores nationwide last summer, even though he appeared in literally one shot.

That may sound like a case of putting the cart before the horse, but in Hollywood the cart and horse have been near equal partners ever since Star Wars demonstrated that revenues from film-related action figures, magnets and whatnot could rival a movie's ticket sales--and in at least two cases, Batman and Jurassic Park, even surpass box-office revenues. Some estimates place the overall movie tie-in business at $10 billion annually in retail sales worldwide. Entertainment executives make no bones about merchandising's importance. "It's something we all live with every day of our lives," says Richard Cook, chairman of Disney's motion picture group. Time Warner chairman, Gerald Levin, was perhaps excessively frank when he recently talked up Warner Bros.' big holiday release. "Space Jam isn't a movie," he averred, according to the New York Times. "It's a marketing event."

That's a pretty accurate assessment of a movie that drips with so many plugs for products that the characters joke about it in the script. The film, which links Michael Jordan with Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and the rest of the Looney Tunes stable, has generated more than 200 spin-off items that Warner is hoping will eventually pull in $1 billion. That would be on top of the $3 billion already generated annually by Looney Tunes paraphernalia. But Space Jam is different from most movies in that it not only feels as if it were inspired by a TV commercial, it actually was (by Nike's Hare Jordan ad).

Space Jam's biggest competitor on the paraphernalia front will be Disney's new 101 Dalmatians, which hits theaters this week. The movie has a more traditional, if no less disheartening, provenance: it is a blowsy John Hughes-produced remake of the gently witty 1961 Disney cartoon--a live-action remake that would have no reason to exist except that Disney knows the sight of 99 Dalmatian puppies will be irresistible to children and licensees alike. That would seem to be borne out by the fact that more than 130 companies are involved in various Dalmatians products and promotions.

"More so this holiday season than any past year, we're seeing a level of year-end merchandising that's highly unusual," says Brad Globe, head of consumer products for Amblin/Dreamworks. "It's a testament to how big movie licensing has become." Other contenders this December include--perhaps inevitably--two films about toys: 20th Century Fox's Jingle All the Way, which tells the Christmas Eve story of a father who can't find a TV-based action figure for his son, and Disney's Toy Story, which is being given an especially big push to coincide with its video release because Disney--this may surprise anyone who's visited a Disney store in the past year--felt it had underestimated the marketing possibilities when the film was released in theaters last fall. So children can now beg for real toys based on semi-satiric fake toys, a postmodernish irony probably neither they nor their parents will appreciate.

To a great extent, of course, the success of a movie's merchandise depends on the success of the movie itself--kids won't eat the cereal of a movie they, and more importantly their friends, haven't seen. At the same time, box-office success does not always guarantee merchandising success--analysts cite Casper and Independence Day as two recent hit movies that disappointed their licensees. Much depends on how "toyetic" a movie is, in industry parlance, and the degree to which merchandise is sympatico with the film. Flipper licensed a camping set, "which is pretty funny," says director Shapiro, "because dolphins aren't usually found in the forest."

"Not every film is a great merchandising opportunity," says Pat Wyatt, president of licensing for Fox. And not all spin-offs are aimed at junior. Estee Lauder, for instance, is currently marketing a line of makeup called the Face of Evita. But the best bets for merchandising, according to Wyatt, are family films with a strong fantasy element. In toy terms, "creatures do better than representations of people because kids can project a broader fantasy into their play." A more practical problem with human-based toys is getting actors to sign off on their likenesses; another is getting the likenesses right in the first place--a difficulty exemplified by Space Jam's Michael Jordan figurines, whose goofy-fierce look is more evocative of Anthony Mason. Even Wyatt admits that the action figures based on Bill Pullman and Jeff Goldblum in Fox's Independence Day were "kind of beefy."

Because of the nature of the business--it generally takes about a year to design and manufacture a toy and then ship it all the way from Asia, where it is typically made--the battle lines for next summer are already drawn. Hasbro, a licensee for The Lost World, a Jurassic Park sequel, even persuaded the filmmakers to incorporate what promises to be an extremely toyetic dino-chasing truck into the film's plot--a nifty cart indeed.

--With reporting by Georgia Harbison/New York and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles

With reporting by Georgia Harbison/New York and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles