A long time ago, Hollywood figured out that movies are more than an hour or two at the cinema. The worlds and characters in them are valuable intellectual property in their own right, spawning whole franchises that end up anywhere and everywhere. Here are some places Hollywood IP ended up that you might not expect.
Businesses
It may seem strange to say ‘businesses’ are an unexpected place for Hollywood IP to end up (movies are a business, after all), but here we mean businesses from movies. Some businesses start off as fiction on the big screen and then, because they’re so memorable and popular, they bleed into the real world.
Paramount is responsible for probably the two biggest examples of this. In 1971, Paramount licensed out the Willy Wonka Candy Company name to celebrate the release of the Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory film adaptation. Then, in 1996, they licensed the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company name to a real restaurant chain two years after Forrest Gump released. Both are still going and, even weirder, some people out there might know the real-world businesses more than the stories they came from.
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Several shows have done this too. Though it’s phased out by now, in 2011 NBC licensed the name Dunder Mifflin out to Staples, to promote The Office. The deal ran for several years, past the actual show’s end, as it became a popular product line in its own right before shuttering. Even so, Dunder Mifflin-branded products are still available elsewhere.
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Online Games and Entertainment
A lot of readers will remember the movie tie-in games that were common in the 2000s, to varying degrees of success.
Along with those games, there’s also an enduring subsection of slot games that build off of existing movie IPs. They take scenes and characters from movies and reframe them as a game of chance, starting off with tie-in cabinets on the casino floor. Then, when online slots took off, they allowed game makers to create fully rendered, more immersive tie-in games for the internet instead.
Franchises like Jurassic Park took the leap, joining libraries of thousands of slot games distributed through online casinos, often through white-labelled platforms. When companies like Vyking iGaming build those platforms and aggregate the most popular games, several movie tie-ins make the cut, alongside others inspired by Greek myth and other cultural tales.
Besides slots, another surprising tie-in is pinball games. More the realm of enthusiasts than casual players, movies and even shows like Stranger Things work with builders to release modified, flashy pinball tables that have been given a similar treatment. That is, they’ve taken the basic pinball formula but added art, special effects, and sometimes built-in video that references the franchise it’s inspired by.
Your Signature
This one’s quite specific to Japan, but that probably makes it even more unexpected. In Japan, classic written signatures aren’t so popular. Instead, many still use ink-dipped stamps, similar to how European royalty stamped their letters in the past. The stamp is called the Hanko and it leaves an Inkan, a legally binding seal that can be used to sign legal documents, from opening a bank account to closing a business deal.
Each Inkan contains the family name, or a facsimile of it in Katakana or Romaji if you’re a foreign resident. It’s not all business, however, as stamp makers like Hankozu offer playful (but still legally binding) designs that add cute animals and other novelty images beside your name. Among them are icons from Star Wars, like Darth Vader or Stormtrooper helmets, plus other characters popular in both the West and Japan.
For those few who have one, it’s probably the most personal and impactful way that Hollywood IP has appeared in their life. It’ll be interesting to see how many real-world experiences continue to build on Hollywood IP over time and what new ones are waiting in the future.
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