Very few media licenses find the level of success Spider-Man does in one industry, let alone all of them. At NPD, our Entertainment team tracks consumers and sales of products across Media (TV/Movies), Games, Toys, and Books. The Spider-Man license has been standing strong in all of them since the new Spider-Man: Homecoming movie released on July 7, 2017, grossing an impressive $334 million domestically in the five months it was in theaters.
Even before the movie’s release, excitement for the movie drove fans to purchase other related Spider-Man DVDs, with disc sales spiking by 234 percent year-over-year in June 2017, driven primarily by the original Spider-Man trilogy.
During the movie’s release month, book sales for Spider-Man jumped year over year by 254 percent, propelling Spider-Man as the #29 ranked license in books for July 2017. Excitement for the license continued, and through the remainder of the year (July-December), book sales were up by 55 percent over the same time period in 2016.
Licensed Spider-Man toys also saw a significant bump in sales due to the movie’s release, increasing by 183 percent in July 2017 to rank as the fifth highest-selling toy industry license that month (Spider-Man ranked as the 16th highest-selling toy industry license in July 2016); and sales for the new Spider-Man video game, published by Sony in September 2018, have been more than twice as successful as any other Spider-Man video game in history.
It has been a hot two years for Spider-Man, and we are waiting attentively to see how Marvel carries this momentum into 2019 with the new Avengers 4 and Spider-Man: Far From Home movies coming in the first half of the year.