CS 202

Company Project 3: Movie Tie-ins Project

Introduction: Most of the money made by movies these days actually comes from “ancillary products” which are things like tee-shirts, action figures, Burger King meals etc. Your job is to research and price a set of products for your movie. You can make up a movie title, and subject matter (stick to action-flick type themes, like Matrix, etc.) Try to come up with a fancy-looking Logo and image for the flim. Document your sources wherever possible.

Project Elements:

A) Create a spreadsheet that will show your project budget. You need to find real numbers for the products if you can, or at least estimates available from online sites that make this stuff. Your budget total is $20,000,000. Your profit margins should be high, predict a return of 3 to 1 on the investment (assume a hit movie). Break your costs into salaries (figure the project lasts 6 months a relatively small amount), production costs and advertising. Make plans to have other companies help pay for of your advertising. Advertising such as TV ads will probably cost most of your money.

B) Research the cost of doing a deck of collectible cards for the movie. These cards will be like baseball cards, or magic the gathering cards, but will depict characters from your movie. How much will it cost to produce packs of 8-15 cards each that you can sell in foil packages? If you sell the decks for 2-3 dollars each, how much money can you make?

C) Find out about making action figures for toy stores. How much do other companies sell them for? How much can you make them for, say 5 types of figures? Use up a good portion of your budget here, they sell well.

D) Budget part of your money for promotional items that are essentially free advertisements sold or given away, such as tee shirts and posters. Assume that a fast food tie-in is basically free (or better), as the chain involved will foot the bill for the toys in order to sell their food.

E) Create a power point presentation that takes about 5 minutes to go thru. This should use charts made from your spreadsheets giving the numbers you project. The Presentation should show the information gathered in the other portions of this report, describing your project and your progress, and your future chances.

F) Create a website selling your Movie, it should have a gallery of the cast with invented characters they will play in the film.

G) Find and print out proof that a .com site with a reasonably similar name to your movie title (such as LunchTimeTheMovie.com) is open and unregistered.

Notes: This project will require a considerable amount of research. The more research you do, the more realistic your work will be, improving your grade. It is up to your group to decide on the division of labor. You can either work together on everything, or assign each member a different task to complete, or some mixture of the two. Make sure that you all see everyone’s work and progress along the way, so that you aren’t surprised at the end.