Cinema, Hollywood and franchises are now an inseparable trinomial. Cinema that entertains and collects money is still produced in Hollywood as it was a century ago and today Hollywood is looking for franchises as Lancelot was looking for the Holy Grail. Of the 150 films produced by Hollywood studios in 2014, as many as 30 are sequels to something. Until now, it has been comics that have provided the fuel for the franchise film industry. In 11 years, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a media franchise of films based on Marvel Comics characters, produced 21 films that grossed a total of $12,6 billion. James Bond has been around for 22 years, has 25 films to his credit, but has grossed a total of 2 billion less than Marvel superheroes. The 16 films starring Batman, the DC Comics comic book character, produced $27 billion over 5,8 years. Close behind are the 7 Spiderman films, always a hero created by Marvel Comics, with 5,5 billion dollars. In short, in the top ten positions of the movie franchises that have done better at the box office there are 4 films with comic book heroes, 5 films based on novels and Star Wars which, alone, has crumbled all the box office records of all time. Those who are fascinated by movie franchise statistics can go to this page and satisfy their classification curiosity.
Videogames = franchises
What other media sector is capable of creating franchises like comics? Video games! It is a very young, totally digital industry, with completely new players, with unprecedented business models and with an audience that makes marketers salivate, 56% of users are under 35 years old. An estimated 155 million Americans (51%) play video games on a regular basis. In Italy, habitual gamers are estimated at ten million. The videogames industry has everything that other media sectors lack to face the epochal change in the ways of consuming and distributing content. Collectively it is now as big as the film industry: PwC predicts that in 2019 the entire video game industry will be worth $93 billion, just shy of the $10 billion-plus movie industry.
But the most interesting thing is not these numbers, but the ability of video games to know how to create a revolutionary narrative form capable of radically changing the way stories are told and the way relationships between the people involved in the activity take place. . To say, something that in public perception is at the antipodes of videogames, that is education, can really be reformed around some concepts and some practices that are peculiar to videogames. For example, Microsoft saw in Minecraft, a Swedish video game purchased by the Redmond giant in 2014, the possibility of developing an educational project, called MinecraftEdu, to be used for learning. To date, 100 million fans use the video game which encourages creativity, collaboration between people and stimulates problem solving. Isn't that what school is supposed to teach?
Video games organically incorporate the two founding concepts of a new media: interactivity and social relationship administered through software. No other media is able to achieve the powerful fusion between content, software and relational experience as videogame narratives are able to do. This is why the videogame industry, also in its distribution and marketing methods, is the model of the future to which all subjects of the cultural and entertainment industry (authors, creatives, developers, production houses and platforms of distribution) must strive to package content aimed at new generation consumers.
The video game business is a very difficult business, perhaps more difficult than catering which, according to the “Economist”, is the most demanding economic activity that exists. However, the video game sector offers a unique opportunity especially for start-ups. The opportunity to build a video game that can become a real franchise in a very short time, especially in the mobile gaming sector, the one with the highest growth rate and the most promising. In a few weeks the game can gather millions of players and a part of these, those who bring the economic resources (the white whales), can really develop a form of addiction towards the content. As we well know, the potential of a franchise is enormous. It can be a gold mine with inexhaustible veins.
Therefore: videogames = cinema
There is one problem, though. The problem is the difficulty, it would be better to say the impossibility, on the part of software houses or publishers to replicate a success with different characters and stories from the product already established as a franchise. Zynga didn't make it after FarmVille, Rovio didn't succeed with Angry Birds which is the most downloaded application on mobile devices. It therefore happens that in a first phase, that of the affirmation of the franchise, the growth of the business takes place in three figures and then levels off if a new product does not intervene to replicate the success of the previous one. And this phenomenon has not yet been seen on a correct scale. It happens that the software houses, to maintain the levels of employment and profitability and to fulfill the expectations of the shareholders, have to diversify in order to complete the potential of the franchise, which however can be difficult to spend outside the video game audience. Hence the mercandising of video game characters and, now, with renewed vigor, the attempt to find an outlet on the big and small screen by producing films or television series based on the adventures of these characters.
The attempts made so far have been good, but not so encouraging. Perhaps the only video game franchise to leave a mark on the cinema was Resident Evil: the 7 survival horror films from Japanese Capcom, starring the splendid Milla Jovovich and Michelle Rodriguez, grossed just over 1 billion dollars. The two films by Lara Croft, with an equally magnificent actress as Angelina Jolie, have together exceeded 600 million dollars. The top 15 blockbuster video game films made an estimated $2,5 billion, with an average of $160 million per film. It's not a great achievement and there is also the aggravating circumstance that the critics have torn these adaptations to pieces, cutting off any possibility of widening the audience beyond the aficionados. For cinema audiences, movies featuring video game heroes are still B-movies.
Compared to the beginning of 2000, when the Resident Evil and Lara Croft saga began, the quality of video games and the stories told in video games has grown a lot and therefore these distant attempts to bring video games to the cinema constitute a precedent with limited validity . What happens is that video game publishers are once again looking to the cinema as a possible powerful extension of their video franchises. Rovio is doing it with The Angry Birds Movie to be released in 2016, but Activision Blizzard is doing it on a grand scale, based in Santa Monica in California, which, together with Electronic Art, is the fourth largest group in the world in the production of video games preceded only by the Chinese of Tencent, Sony and Microsoft.
The article by Tim Bradshaw, the tech reporter of the "Financial Times" (reproduced below in the Italian translation by Ilaria Amurri) describes how the Santa Monica group is preparing to travel a few kilometers to storm Hollywood with its franchises . Here is now born Activision Blizzard Studios. Good luck!
Activision establishes its own film studio
Activision Blizzard has just hired the Hollywood producer of The Hateful Eight, by Quentin Tarantino, to make films and TV series based on video games such as Skylanders and Call of Duty. Robert Kotick, CEO of Activision Blizzard Studios, decided to launch this new studio in late 2014, soon after announcing the $5,9 billion acquisition of Candy Crush maker King Digital. For Kotick it is essential to diversify the company, renewing the effort in the field of video games and competitive eSports and exploiting the great Activision franchises to propose new entertainment formats.
Its latest recruit, Stacey Sher, has more than two decades of Hollywood experience and has worked with directors such as Oliver Stone, Steven Soderbergh and Terry Gilliam. Among her best references are Erin Brockovich, Django Unchained and Gattaca as well as the Comedy Central TV series titled Reno 911!. Today, the producer is co-president of Activision Blizzard Studios and she will work alongside Nick van Dyk, a former Walt Disney executive who helped in the acquisition of the famous animation company Pixar, Marvel and Lucasfilm.
Activision's new initiative follows a long year of video game film franchises, with titles all due out in 2016 such as Angry Birds, Assassin's Creed and Warcraft, from Blizzard Entertainment itself. Kotick's hope is that Activision can count on the tens of millions of loyal gamers who return year after year to franchises like Call of Duty.
Video games and cinema, a wedding to do
Yet even the most beloved video games find variable results when it comes to transferring them to the big screen. In the 90s Super Mario Bros and Street Fighter II, which had enjoyed enormous success, flopped at the box office, while others, such as Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) and the Resident Evil series, enjoyed considerable economic success despite severe criticism.
Having produced films such as Pulp Fiction (1994), Sher lends some creative credibility to the Activision Studios project. “Her ability to collaborate with the brightest and most talented people in entertainment and her constant pursuit of creativity make her a perfect fit for Activision Blizzard Studios,” says Kotick. For her part, Sher believes that Activision's "dedication to quality" can allow the company to shake off the negative legacy of certain films that have in the past been based on video games. In fact, she declares the producer:
The films I made, regardless of genre and target audience, wanted to be completely particular. For years I ran a tiny production company and I find that often when you're small you can do more than that.
Tarantino also speaks enthusiastically about her: “she was a fantastic collaborator for the three films we made together”.
According to experts, Activision's choice reflects the growing importance of video games in the vast entertainment industry, in which sales of the latter have far exceeded the cinematic receipts of recent years. explains Piers Harding-Rolls, director of the games division at the consultancy IHS.
Today, the production of video games and franchises is an excellent opportunity in the entertainment sector, which greatly reduces the risks associated with this type of diversification strategy. Billion-dollar franchises like Activision's demonstrate that the company is better placed than a large portion of its competitors and that its transition can be successful.
The need to diversify to add new audiencesMichael Pachter, of Wedbush Securities in Los Angeles, describes Stacey Sher as “hugely talented,” but wonders if Activision has a strong enough story to back up a full-fledged film: they are only interesting if they have a compelling storyline and it seems clear to me that Blizzard has a lot of them available, even if it can be difficult in some cases, such as with Call of Duty. It might rather work for a Skylanders TV series." The first novelty of the year will in fact be an animated television program based on the Skylanders franchise, with a series of plastic figures that reproduce the characters from the game.
Van Dyk is convinced that Activision Blizzard's films can do even better than those of the big Hollywood studios, thanks to successful franchises and an easily identifiable target.
We started from scratch and tried to understand how audiences experience entertainment. Ours will be a much more compact, light and efficient organization, we won't limit ourselves to entering the television and film system, but it will be something completely different.
The eSport
The new co-president was hired after the company acquired Major League Gaming last week, which it organizes with titles like Call of Duty. Esports has grown into a multi-billion dollar business in recent years, with tens of millions of gamers watching competitions online on sites like Amazon-acquired Twitch and live in sporting arenas around the world. Activision reportedly paid $46 million for MLG, which helped pave its way into the market.
Last November, during a meeting of its investors, Activision said it wanted to reach new players and consolidate its commitment to its current target, focusing heavily on eSports, movies and TV series.
