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The LEGO Ninjago Movie Home Release


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It seems like the LEGO Ninjago Movie was just in theaters, but already they're ready to release it for the smaller screens. The official Facebook and Twitter pages have updated their cover photos reflecting the upcoming release dates. The digital movie will be available for download on December 12th, 2017, and the Blu-Ray copy will be coming out on December 19th, 2017, just in time for the last minute holiday shopping sprees. Hopefully there will be some special features included, but at the very least it will allow fans to pause and admire the on screen details of Ninjago City.

 

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Nothing says "this movie failed" like trying to make it a direct-to-DVD release. This was a really bad move on Lego's part. They could have at least waited another 20 or so years for the kids who are into ninjago to grow up and become nostalgic for it.

What is that supposed to mean? It's coming out on DVD about three months after it came out in theaters. That's not really anything unusual — the same thing happened with Zootopia and Trolls, both of which were commercially successful. I'm not pretending that The LEGO Ninjago Movie was a huge box office success like those, but how on earth does it getting released on DVD much like any other animated movie have anything to do with its poor box office performance? You also don't seem to understand the meaning of the phrase "direct to DVD".

 

Also, waiting 20 years for adults to be nostalgic for a brand that's already wildly popular with kids right now is a pretty dumb strategy. You didn't see Pokémon, Ninja Turtles, Transformers, Harry Potter, or Bionicle waiting twenty years to release their first movies. Haven't you ever heard the phrase "strike while the iron's hot"?

Edited by Aanchir
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Nothing says "this movie failed" like trying to make it a direct-to-DVD release. This was a really bad move on Lego's part. They could have at least waited another 20 or so years for the kids who are into ninjago to grow up and become nostalgic for it.

What is that supposed to mean? It's coming out on DVD about three months after it came out in theaters. That's not really anything unusual — the same thing happened with Zootopia and Trolls, both of which were commercially successful. I'm not pretending that The LEGO Ninjago Movie was a huge box office success like those, but how on earth does it getting released on DVD much like any other animated movie have anything to do with its poor box office performance? You also don't seem to understand the meaning of the phrase "direct to DVD".

 

Also, waiting 20 years for adults to be nostalgic for a brand that's already wildly popular with kids right now is a pretty dumb strategy. You didn't see Pokémon, Ninja Turtles, Transformers, Harry Potter, or Bionicle waiting twenty years to release their first movies. Haven't you ever heard the phrase "strike while the iron's hot"?

 

The other Lego movies had a 4 month space between their DVD release and cinema release. The release spaces also seem to vary by company but WB tend to wait 4 months or longer before their films are given a home media release (not counting streaming). So there's only been a 3 month period between the cinema release and the DVD release. And that's just the U.S. Here in Britain the film has only been out since October 13th meaning we're (potentially) looking at only a 2 month gap. It's clearly a move by the company to get their money back. A very smart one at that. Lego stuff sells great on DVD. Their strategy is to release the film early on DVD/blu-ray and make their money back that way (other films have successfully done this).

 

And ninjago isn't culturally significant enough to warrant a film kids will watch on mass. From what I understand it's success is comparable to that of bionicle. Bionicle for all it's success has never been that significant in popular culture. So I see no reason why ninjago would be different (the failure of this film proves that). The reason the bionicle films did well was because of the fact it was direct to DVD/VHS. Getting parents to spend more than a DVD costs today for a film they'll likely be turned off by is a much tougher sell than a film you could purchase fairly cheaply on VHS, own it permanently, and you can leave the kids to watch in their spare time. As I predicted in 2013 Lego were overestimating how significant their brands are and the film did even worse then I expected.

It's time to move on.

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Don't hurt you arm from all that self back patting you're doing there. :sly:

 

I'm guessing that the speed to get it to Bluray has more to do with the holiday than anything else, cause then it'll sell better as a last minute gift and such. So it's a fast turnaround but not exactly unprecedented. Plus, there's always the fact to consider that this is a kids movie, which don't necessarily get judged by the same standard as some of the other big movies, and sometimes I feel like AFOLs forget this.

 

Although I don't know how comparable to Bionicle it's success is. As an overall theme, it's clearly doing better, since it not only got revived due to user input but also thrived. As a movie, you can't really compare a theatrical release to a DVD/VHS release (especially when there's the potential that the movie will sell better on disc, which has been known to happen before.)

 

I dunno, I know I didn't like the movie, but I still feel like defending it cause the sets were unusually awesome, IMO perhaps one of the better releases when compared to The Lego Movie and The Lego Batman Movie waves...

 

:music:

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Nothing says "this movie failed" like trying to make it a direct-to-DVD release. This was a really bad move on Lego's part. They could have at least waited another 20 or so years for the kids who are into ninjago to grow up and become nostalgic for it.

What is that supposed to mean? It's coming out on DVD about three months after it came out in theaters. That's not really anything unusual — the same thing happened with Zootopia and Trolls, both of which were commercially successful. I'm not pretending that The LEGO Ninjago Movie was a huge box office success like those, but how on earth does it getting released on DVD much like any other animated movie have anything to do with its poor box office performance? You also don't seem to understand the meaning of the phrase "direct to DVD".

 

Also, waiting 20 years for adults to be nostalgic for a brand that's already wildly popular with kids right now is a pretty dumb strategy. You didn't see Pokémon, Ninja Turtles, Transformers, Harry Potter, or Bionicle waiting twenty years to release their first movies. Haven't you ever heard the phrase "strike while the iron's hot"?

 

The other Lego movies had a 4 month space between their DVD release and cinema release. The release spaces also seem to vary by company but WB tend to wait 4 months or longer before their films are given a home media release (not counting streaming). So there's only been a 3 month period between the cinema release and the DVD release. And that's just the U.S. Here in Britain the film has only been out since October 13th meaning we're (potentially) looking at only a 2 month gap. It's clearly a move by the company to get their money back. A very smart one at that. Lego stuff sells great on DVD. Their strategy is to release the film early on DVD/blu-ray and make their money back that way (other films have successfully done this).

 

And ninjago isn't culturally significant enough to warrant a film kids will watch on mass. From what I understand it's success is comparable to that of bionicle. Bionicle for all it's success has never been that significant in popular culture. So I see no reason why ninjago would be different (the failure of this film proves that). The reason the bionicle films did well was because of the fact it was direct to DVD/VHS. Getting parents to spend more than a DVD costs today for a film they'll likely be turned off by is a much tougher sell than a film you could purchase fairly cheaply on VHS, own it permanently, and you can leave the kids to watch in their spare time. As I predicted in 2013 Lego were overestimating how significant their brands are and the film did even worse then I expected.

 

The other Lego movies also released in the Spring, well before the Christmas holidays. By contrast, the Ninjago Movie came out in the fall. Even if the Ninjago Movie had been a resounding success, it would have probably made sense to put out the home media release on a more accelerated timetable than the other Lego movies to take advantage of holiday demand.

 

Theatrically, the Ninjago movie has already made its budget back, albeit with a smaller profit margin than the prior two Lego movies. So your attempt to paint this as some last-ditch effort to make up a loss doesn't really jive with the facts.

 

Lego may indeed have overestimated Ninjago's popularity with mass audiences. They did, however, make a moderately successful movie regardless, probably much moreso than they would if they'd "waited 20 years" in the hopes that the fans who would be interested in a Ninjago movie right now would magically become MORE interested by waiting until they're in their thirties.

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Formerly Lyichir: Rachira of Influence

Aanchir's and Meiko's brother

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We actually have two pieces of quantitative evidence that Ninjago may be more popular than Bionicle was. For one thing, Ninjago's sales in 2011 were stronger than ANY previous theme's first-year sales — including Bionicle's. Furthermore, according to Google Trends, monthly search interest over the past three years has been as high or higher than search interest for Bionicle was at any point past January 2004 — search interest last month specifically was more than twice as high as Bionicle's has been as long as Google's been tracking this kind of data.

 

That doesn't, of course, mean Ninjago is an inherently more appealing theme. There are a lot of non-theme-specific factors that have changed since Bionicle G1's heyday… more kids use the internet on a regular basis, LEGO is a much bigger company with a presence in many more countries, etc. But I think you're selling Ninjago's popularity short. Regardless of the reasons, there's little doubt that it's reaching more kids and families than Bionicle generally has.

 

And regardless of the LEGO Ninjago Movie not meeting expectations, there's still no reason to think that waiting 20 years for the kids who love a franchise to grow up would be a better strategy than just making a movie while the franchise is still popular. If nothing else, the presence of a movie NOW will get it enough exposure that it'll have a better chance of LASTING twenty years. The original Transformers animated movie in 1986 was not commercially successful in terms of its box office returns, but it was still an iconic piece of Transformers media that helped further popularize the brand. The fact that it existed and stuck in people's memory helped keep the brand going to a point where the much more commercially successful live-action Transformers movies even got a chance to happen.

 

The LEGO Ninjago Movie has been substantially more successful, netting about 70% more box office revenue than its budget. By LEGO Movie standards that's not a huge profit, but it's not a loss by any stretch of the imagination. It is very likely that the LEGO Ninjago Movie will help boost the popularity of the Ninjago sets and TV series going forward, which I have no doubt is a big part of why LEGO chose to make it in the first place.

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