Disney bares its armoury for Infinity War
With 2,000 screens and a marketing budget twice that of its mega hit Jungle Book, the studio packs an expensive punch for its most lucrative franchise
Taking a cue from the years it spent navigating its way through Bollywood’s labyrinthine ways before changing tracks, Disney is pulling out every marketing trick in the book to promote its latest release from the Marvel cinematic universe, Avengers: Infinity War. The studio says it has upped the marketing budget to double that it spent on Jungle Book, has tied up with more than 60 retail outlets for in-store promotions and merchandise sales and is releasing the movie in three languages apart from English. According to industry estimates, the studio could be spending close to ~30-35 crore on its localisation efforts, which include marketing and promotion in multiple languages as well the cost of dubbing the movie.
Disney has also tied up with Indian Premier League franchise Kolkata Knight Riders for a range of co-branded merchandise, hoping to leverage the fanatic behaviour of cricket fans during this season to generate further excitement over the movie. Also in anticipation of an enthusiastic response and perhaps, also to drive home the significance of the local market, Disney opened bookings for the movie three days earlier than usual.
The marketing of superhero movies is much easier today than it was in 2008 when the first in the series was released in India, Ironman in 2008. At the time the American comicbook superhero culture was still to spread as widely in the country as it has today, thanks to sustained marketing by the studios. While the popularity of the comic characters and the movies have soared, the stakes are also much higher today. And with Infinity War, Marvel and Disney are hoping for a successful culmination of the 18 films released over the past ten years.
For the India team at Disney, the challenge was to popularise the movies in a country where the source material was not consumed, at least by the masses. Bikram Duggal, executive director and head, studio entertainment at Disney India says that the agenda was to make Marvel’s Avengers a pop culture brand in India. “We’ve succeeded in doing so thanks to a combination of global and local hooks.”
Disney has whipped up enthusiasm and commercial success with its growing brood of superheroes with unerring regularity for the past decade. And its last release under the Avengers umbrella, Black Panther, broke all previous records at the box office. This has meant developing individual characters and stories in independent films and tying them up all together in a coherent continuous narrative. The heroes leading disparate existences in different comic books first came together in 2012, in Marvel’s Avengers. Since thenthere have been new characters and new story lines taking the superhero fantasy forward in movies such as Guardians of the Galaxy, Ant-man, Doctor Strange and Black Panther.
Globally, the studio has said that its strategy is to build a believable and engaging world of heroes. To begin with the Indian market was no more than a distribution outpost, but sustained marketing by the studio and a changing set of norms that govern popular culture in the country have opened up a box of opportunities. One of the big factors contributing to the success of the franchise has been localisation, in terms of regionbased marketing and promotion and multi-lingual releases of the movies.
“As is known, India does not have a strong comic book culture. Having said that, the movies attracted eyeballs since the beginning, as early as back in 2008 with the first Ironman film. With localisation, we were able to cast a much wider net. As the franchise developed, we were able to attract not only the followers of the Marvel universe, but the fringe viewers and even new audiences. Today, regional dubs (Hindi, Tamil and Telugu) account for 50 per cent of the business for Marvel films, a significant growth from the 30 per cent contribution we saw a decade back,” Dutta adds.
The contribution of local language dubs has helped many recent Hollywood titles increase footfalls to the cinema halls. Titles like The Jungle Book have set a benchmark for what intelligent localisation can achieve for a Hollywood film say trade analysts. Taking a cue from its 2016 hit, Disney is releasing Infinity Wars in three local languages.
Dutta expands on the localisation strategy, “A lot of the new audience comes from the language dubs because we are making good content available in a language of (their) choice. Wherever possible, we have tapped into local talent to better localise the content. For Infinity War, we have roped in Rana Dagubatti to voice Thanos (the franchise’s Big Bad) for the Telugu version. We’ve got a good response from the viewers (in the region) since the announcement and promotion activity related to the Telugu version.”
In the past too, Hollywood studios have used popular Indian actors to voice key characters in regional dubs. While The Jungle Book had an illustrious voice cast, Varun Dhawan voiced Captain America in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War and Gaurav Chopra voiced the character of Thor in Thor: Ragnarok. Arshad Warsi has voiced Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean: Salazar’s Revenge and Sony Pictures roped in Tiger Shroff to voice the titular character in 2017’s Spiderman: Homecoming.