The summer movie season is officially canceled — and there’s one industry besides Hollywood having a tough time stomaching that news: the toy biz.
Hollywood and the toy industry are pretty simpatico. Back in 2015, one analyst estimated that movie tie-in toys made up 21% of $20.4B in toy sales.
Toy companies had already planned dozens of tie-ins for the big blockbusters of 2020 — Minions: The Rise of Gru, Fast & Furious 9, Mulan, Black Widow, Wonder Woman 1984, and Top Gun: Maverick.
But when Hollywood scrapped those original movie release dates, it left the toys in retail purgatory.
By the time COVID-19 hit, tie-in toys for summer blockbusters were already reaching retailers, The Toy Insider’s James Zahn tells us.
Big chains like Target could either store the toys until next year, which can get expensive — or they could try to sell them.
But it’s tough to get kids to buy toys for a film they haven’t seen. And toys for some big releases — like Mulan — have already hit the clearance bin.
NBCUniversal pushed back the newest film in the Minions franchise a full year, and now they have buckets of yellow toys to unload onto kids.
So they’re getting creative. Maybe you caught the recent Minions reruns on NBC? According to Zahn, those are ads for the toys in all but name.
Zahn says that he’s noticed a new trend on Instagram lately: “The past couple weeks, quite a few influencers seem to have received Minions toy packages.”