Having had a conversation about Men in Black‘s and Lionsgate’s franchise futures in the first half of our monthly conversation, IMDb Managing Editor Keith Simanton is back with us, this time to look at some of the challenges facing the box office this summer and what hope we have for a bounce-back in June after what was (Avengers aside) a pretty slow May.Russ Burlingame: We’ve talked a bit about merchandising, and it’s interesting–that’s something that I don’t really ever remember Lionsgate doing very well. The Hunger Games notwithstanding, the only time I can ever remember seeing a Lionsgate movie represented on a t-shirt or a hat was when Kevin Smith or Michael Moore went out of pocket.Keith Simanton: [Laughs] You can’t do a whole lot with the Saw torture line–the head-cage line. Yeah, I think it’s an area that–once companies get good at, it’s then a pipeline because they’ve got the suppliers and they’ve got the outlets and they use things like Hot Topic and I think as you get better at that, you see the additional revenue that you can get but obviously you’ve got to have a property where people want to snatch it up.RB: And even though Hot Topic doesn’t have the same kind of cache anymore that it used to–I think it’s much less significant than it was even five years ago…KS: Oh, absolutely.RB: But it’s still a great venue because if you can sell there, it helps you get placement in someplace like Target or Kohls, where the customer base is just exponentially bigger and so it’s not as “cool,” but you make a lot more money. The kind of mainstream retail community still sees them as a tastemaker because these things are so slow to change.KS: Yeah, exactly. And the other thing that’s kind of fascinating to me is that we’ve got The Amazing Spider-Man next and then The Dark Knight Rises, so July’s going to be big.RB: Even before that, you have Prometheus and Snow White, which are movies that are going to make $150 million.KS: Yeah, I saw Prometheus last night.
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