Written by Roberto Stanichi is the President, Chief Marketing and Global Brand Officer over at Mattel.
During an earnings call a couple of days ago, Roberto was asked to address the next couple years for the Masters of the Universe brand after “the movie didn’t perform as well as hoped for in theaters.”
While streaming has found He-Man a larger audience, Roberto explained that when Mattel looks at the success of the movie, box office is just one aspect… and not every movie will have the impact like Barbie.
“We’ve always said that not every movie will be the next Barbie, we also said that you don’t need a movie to be that successful as Barbie to have real economic impact on the company, because we own the IP, we own the underlying rights in all categories for the IP, all we need is to ignite and delight fans, we capture value across multiple verticals. This is exactly the flywheel and the brand-centric operating model that we’ve been implementing.”
That value that Roberto is explaining is (in part) Mattel seeing “gross billings for Masters of the Universe more than tripling year-to-date” and Mattel being crowned “the number 1 manufacturer in action figures for the month of June“.
“We’re looking at it in terms of the overall impact on the franchise and what the movie did for the Masters of the Universe overall. As a result of the movie, we expect Masters of the Universe to become an important action figure franchise for Mattel into the future.”
“When you take a step back and you look at what’s happened to this brand that has been, for the most part, not commercialized for more than 40 years, and how we brought it back into current culture with all of the awareness and excitement and new generation of fans, we’re very happy with where it is, and this will be an important driver for the company in 2026 and beyond.”
We’ll see you next time.
Here’s how Forbes covered it– also compared to Hasbro.
MOTU sales doing well thanks to the movie– and the movie doing well on streaming.
But, other parts are more difficult, like rising costs eating into the profits and creating a loss. Perhaps they spent a lot on developing the new toys. Hopefully from now on, they can reap the benefits!