Between The Avengers, The Amazing Spider-Man, and X-Men First Class, Marvel’s superheroes are proving that comic characters no longer just belong to a niche audience of comic fans. They’re also proving that consumers are willing to invest several years of their time into a product (e.g. The Avengers) and are still willing to check a series reboot if it is well executed (i.e. Spider-Man and X-Men). The commercial success of all of these films have created major implications and expectations for years to come on future movies, the studios that produce them, and the brands that smartly integrate into them.
The largest expectation now is that there is a proven audience for these kinds of films, so how does a studio go about transforming lesser known characters and stories into blockbuster hits? Examples of great storytellers who all lack characters that have been saturated in our pop culture for years like the Hulk, but are perfect for the big screen are Brian K Vaughan’s Runaways, Abnett and Lanning’s Guardians of the Galaxy, or even Peter Milligan and Mike Allred’s X-Statix. The success and failure of these properties are all hinged upon knowing your marketing decisions will work instead of waiting until after you activate them to know.
Today, with the existence of real-time audience data in social media, movie studios can now mitigate risk and make more informed marketing decisions that will help them maximize a film’s box office performance. Movie studios can grow to become more efficient marketing organizations throughout the entire life of a film, from pre-production, to theatrical release, to sustaining audience engagement once it leaves the theatres. Real-time audience data also makes planning, casting, positioning, and timing decisions smarter. More importantly studios can now base their decisions upon audience data that is available in real-time, so they can adapt to unanticipated changes.
So in the spirit of the upcoming San Diego Comic Con, and the recent release of The Amazing Spider-Man, we here at Networked Insights have decided to use SocialSense, our marketing decision platform, to share insights into what Marvel superheroes are currently resonating with fans and which ones could be starring in the next blockbuster!
Update
This infographic was picked up by Mashable and The Huffington Post.