Something something, war of the nerds.
It may have worked for somethings in the past, but will it work this time?
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SOURCES
https://www.marvel.com/articles/comics/star-wars-marvel-hope-assembles-crossover-comic-series-january-2027 Godzilla vs
Charles Barkley TV commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35pNPq0HkG0
https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Godzilla_(Earth-616)
https://thecmo.com/brand-communications/brand-collaboration-examples/
https://www.press.bmwgroup.com/global/article/detail/T0169486EN/louis-vuitton-creates-tailor-made-luggage-for-the-bmw-i8-forward-looking-travel-bags-for-progressive-driving-made-from-carbon-fibre
Red Bull Statos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOoHArAzdug
https://www.billboard.com/culture/product-recommendations/crocs-touchland-collaboration-hand-sanitizer-shop-1236021975/
https://www.unilever.com/news/news-search/2025/doves-crumbl-collaboration-wins-a-new-generation-of-socialfirst-shoppers/
Picture sources: https://godzilla.com/blogs/news/godzilla-vs-marvel-comics https://docmanhattan.blogspot.com/2024/02/godzilla-vs-charles-barkley.html
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
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TRANSCRIPT:
So I don’t know if you heard, but Marvel Comics and its parent company, Disney, just announced that at long last, they’re going to do what Reese’s once did for chocolate and peanut butter – mix two good things together to see if they can make something better.
Coming in January of 2027, the 5-part crossover miniseries Star Wars/Marvel: Hope Assembles will hit the shelves, written by the famed director and comic book geek Kevin Smith and bringing Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Chewbacca, Princess Leia and familiar heroes from a galaxy far, far away together with Spider-Man, the Avengers, the X-Men and the Fantastic Four.
And don’t worry – Darth Vader will get to hang with Doctor Doom, the bad guy who inspired George Lucas’s Dark Lord of the Sith, and I wouldn’t be too surprised if Thanos wants to take a crack at using the Infinity Gauntlet to revive the Death Star so he can blow up Earth-616, the continuity in which the Marvel comics take place.
You’d think that someone like me would be incredibly excited about this pairing. After all, I love Star Wars, and I grew up reading Marvel Comics. It seems like a natural fit. And yet, when I heard the news and saw the press release Marvel put out about this, all I could do was roll my eyes.
This whole idea sounds like an absolute disaster to me, something we’ll be making fun of down the road, because how could it possibly be good?
Star Wars is a story about an evil empire being thwarted by the best in all of us, and Marvel Comics are about superpowered adrenaline junkies in long underwear, impractical metal suits and admittedly cool-looking Halloween costumes duking it out with supervillains who pop up like a game of whack-a-mole… and that’s when the superheroes aren’t fighting amongst themselves, which is actually pretty often.
I enjoy both types of stories, sure, but Star Wars was a cultural phenomenon that was a turning point for science fiction, cinema and our cultural understanding of the Hero’s Journey. While Marvel Comics are… well, mostly just soap opera slugfests and power fantasies.
And when I was a kid, playing with my toys, it didn’t bother me a bit to have Iron Man pilot Luke Skywalker’s X-Wing or Spider-Man take on camp guarded by Imperial Stormtroopers. As an adult, the whole premise seems absolutely creatively bankrupt to me, the sort of wish fulfillment you can find in a video game, but which doesn’t really have any place in storytelling.
But of course, the purpose behind all of this has nothing to do with creative possibilities, and everything to do with selling comic books and trying to keep both franchises relevant! This isn’t about staying true to the story at all.
It’s about marketing. And if you pay any attention at all to the world of consumer packaged goods, you see this sort of thing happening all the time.
So let’s talk about why marketers love to take two things that aren’t connected and to try to put them together. And why sometimes, you get something better than the sum of the whole, like Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. But other times, you get something truly awful.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
So speaking of comics, one of my favorite comic books of all time is a 1993 promotional tie-in book published by Dark Horse Comics called Godzilla vs. Barkley, and it’s actually a spin-off of a 1992 Nike television commercial called Godzilla vs. Charles Barkley. The commercial features a giant Charles Barkley challenging Godzilla to a game of basketball in the streets of downtown Tokyo.
The ad was hyped up and ran during the 1992 MTV Video Music Awards, and it’s pretty entertaining. It’s also amazing to consider that it was shot over eight days and required four months of editing to produce a 30-second ad of Barkley dunking on Godzilla and then consoling him as they walk away as pals.
The comic book moves the action to California and adds in a completely unnecessary backstory about how Charles Barkley turned into a giant and what rules he and Godzilla decide upon to play. It’s absolutely crazy in the way that only a comic book can be, with the terribly overwrought writing, the ridiculous anything can happen action and the dreamlike illogic you’d expect from the medium.
And look, I say this as a fan of comics as a medium and a pretty regularly reader of them – there are comic books that are written to make you think and feel and see the world differently like Maus or Persepolis or Watchmen, and then there’s everything else, which is pretty much just designed to entertain you for a few minutes.
Godzilla vs. Barkley is absolute trash from a literary perspective, but it’s also so stupid, it’s incredibly fun.
But you’ll also note I mentioned that the whole idea of this pairing had nothing to do with promoting Godzilla movies or Charles Barkley-branded apparel. It was created on behalf of Nike, one of the smartest and best brands out there when it comes to product marketing, and quite out of line with their very famous style of cinematic, inspirational ads featuring athletes achieving peak performance and overcoming great challenges. This concept was pure cheese, hardly even mentioned Nike shoes, and was 100% about being something people would talk about both before and after it aired. And adapting it into a comic book a year later allowed the concept to have a second life and a victory lap in the media.
That’s why Nike initially released the ad on MTV – to build buzz for the idea and to connect with a youthful audience who’d enjoy the concept. And that’s also why the concept doesn’t try to take its dumb idea for a crossover seriously – it just commits to the bit and has a lot of fun with it.
But you might not realize this – Godzilla has also existed within the Marvel Earth-616 canon as a character, and he had his own Marvel comic book from 1977 to 1999 and battled not just the characters the Marvel Cinematic Universe has highlighted like the Avengers, the Fantastic Four and even the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., who had their own Godzilla Squad led by Timothy “Dum Dum” Dugan.
I promise I’m not making any of this up.
And, by the way, just last year, Marvel got the rights to bring Godzilla back into their universe and have him destroy it, conquer it and stomp his way through space while he battled all of these characters again.
But the difference between those Marvel comics and the Charles Barkley one is the absolute novelty of the idea. Having Godzilla show up and battle superheroes is… kind of boring? Because superheroes battle giant monsters all the time, and we all know that Godzilla’s not going to die at the end of the fight because he’s not allowed to. It’s just that whole playing with toys concept again – fun, but creatively unsatisfying.
Godzilla facing a real-world NBA basketball star, on the other hand, is so dumb it’s fun. And that’s really the key to what makes crossing over two brands work as a creative concept – you either need to have a combination that’s so stupid it’s interesting, or so interesting it’s stupid not to combine the two things.
So, let me offer some examples. Let’s start with things that should naturally go together.
Uber launched a collaboration with Spotify in 2014 that allowed Uber customers to connect their Spotify account so they could control the music during their ride. This idea was instantly appealing to many users of both brands and also suggested that Uber had an edge on competitors like Lyft as well as traditional taxi services by putting more control in the hands of its riders. For Spotify, it was also advantageous because it added value to their premium subscription tier. And of course, both brands got higher engagement from their users and better insights into their needs and preferences via collected data.
Another collaboration that made a lot of sense was a 2014 pairing of BMW and Louis Vuitton. BMW was launching a new plug-in hybrid car called the i8 and rather than target the environmentally conscious, which was a pretty heavily contested space, they wanted to appeal to fashionable people as well as travelers since the car could go the distance with its gas engine but also allow for electric charging for local city driving.
So, they worked with Louis Vuitton to build a 4-piece luggage set that included two travel bags, a business base and a garment bag specifically designed to fit perfectly in the car and to share its aesthetic. And again, this made total sense, because even though the two brands were solving two very different problems, the collaboration enhanced the value of both of them. BMW got you where you needed to be reliably and in style, and then Louis Vuitton allowed you to have the perfect transition to take those next steps into a hotel or an airport.
And you can see the same sort of logic in collaborations like Nike and Apple Watch, Lego and Nintendo or Liquid Death and Yeti. These are complementary brands with shared markets that still have lots of crossover appeal.
What about the more unlikely collaborations?
Well, if we go back to 2012, Red Bull and GoPro had a collaboration so good it ultimately won an Emmy. The project, called Stratos, involved high-altitude skydiver Felix Baumgartner flying about 24 miles up into the stratosphere via a helium balloon and then taking a 10-minute free fall back to Earth. He had to wear a Space Walk-style pressure suit to do it, and of course the whole thing was recorded and the resulting production from Red Bull’s media partner Riedel Communications was awarded an Emmy in 2013.
Now, the whole idea of “Red Bull Gives You Wings!” and recording feats of world-record breaking derring-do with a GoPro might seem to be related a little bit, but when you add in the sheer insanity of flying up into space in a capsule being towed by a helium balloon and then jumping out into the stratosphere in a spacesuit from a point where you can see a good chunk of planet Earth below while a Mission Control-style team guides you from Roswell, New Mexico is just… wow.
That’s so stupid it’s interesting. Massively interesting. I felt, as I know a lot of people did, my heart skip a few beats watching Baumgartner take a step out of that capsule and drop towards the Earth. And I don’t even drink Red Bull or use GoPro cameras! But I definitely will associate both brands forevermore with that insanely cool collaboration.
Here’s one that’s less dramatic, but still amazingly novel, and that’s the 2025 collaboration between Crocs and Touchland. Crocs are, of course, the distinctively ugly but super comfortable foam shoes that are inexplicably popular despite breaking pretty much every rule there ever has been about shoe marketing, and Touchland is a premium hand sanitizer brand that seems like it shouldn’t have anything to do with footwear named after scaly reptiles.
But Crocs released a special foam case for the Touchland hand mist product that had ventilation holes so people could insert the popular plastic charms in them, and wouldn’t you know it? The idea was a smashing success last summer, selling out almost immediately and boosting sales of both Crocs products and Touchland hand sanitizer as well as attracting a lot of earned media due to the surprising popularity of the product line.
Here’s one more I never would have thought would work – Dove and Crumbl Cookies. And I don’t mean Dove Chocolates – we’re talking about the stuff you use in the shower! Just saying it out loud makes me think of cookies that taste like soap, or even worse, soaps that look like cookies until you bite into them. Yuck.
But fortunately, this isn’t an edible product. It’s a skincare and haircare line that was distributed exclusively through Walmart and which promised the quality and inclusiveness of Dove along with the smell and comfort of Crumbl Cookies. Both brands turned out to be more complementary in look and style than anyone might have imagined. The products sold out quickly and Dove has said that 52% of buyers were new to their brand.
And what drove interest? The novelty of the idea combined with a savvy social media strategy, primarily on TikTok. People really wanted to try this out for themselves, and unlike social media, which is mostly visual, the product delivered a strong experiential scent and feel that required people who wanted to really see what this brand was about to try it for themselves.
On its face, a really seemingly stupid collaboration. And yet so, so smart in the end.
So, putting two unlike things together definitely can work.
But in light of that, do I really still think it’s a bad idea to merge Star Wars and Marvel Comics together for a limited run authored by one of the most popular voices of Generation X?
Well, yes. I don’t see the angle for “so interesting, it’s stupid not to.” Because Marvel ran a serialized Star Wars comic for years back in the 1980s and it basically was a superheroes in space concept when it departed from the storylines of the movies, and it kinda stank like bantha poodoo.
When Dark Horse Comics took the franchise over, they used it to expand and grow the Star Wars universe in ways more authentic to the films. They created some really beloved stories and even adapted one of George Lucas’s earlier scripts to show how Star Wars could have been depicted if he’d filmed that earlier draft.
Marvel got the franchise back with the Disney takeover, and I’m not going to say it’s been a bad thing. One of the best canonical Star Wars characters ever created outside of the movies, Darth Vader’s criminal archaeologist Doctor Aphra, originated in that series. But those comics are grounded in the Star Wars universe. They’re not about superheroes, and attempts to add the likes of Iron Man or Thor or Captain America or even the Guardians of the Galaxy into those comics would fall flat quickly because that’s just not what Star Wars is about.
There’s little common ground, and as we’ve seen when other disparate media have tried to stage crossovers events, it’s often not as fun in execution as it sounds.
So let’s go the other route and think about “so stupid it’s interesting.” Here’s where I think there is some potential, because you could take the route of making this into a near-parody like the Archie Meets the Punisher comic or a completely comedic pairing like the time The Simpsons and Futurama crossed over because, you know, they’re both animated comedies by the same creator.
But we’ve been down this road before. In 2011, the comic book publisher IDW launched a series called Infestation that included, and I once again promise I’m not making any of this up, Star Trek, GI Joe, Transformers and Ghostbusters… with zombies!
It wound up not being quite as bad as it sounds and thus IDW was able to launch a second series in 2012 that added in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Dungeons & Dragons, Danger Girl and the vampires from 30 Days of Night fighting cosmic elder gods, and yep, it was pretty much scraping the bottom of the barrel by that point, moving from being stupidly interesting to… well, just stupid.
And that’s the danger of a bad crossover or collaboration between two unlike brands. That common ground has to be more than superficial, and just because both brands have movies and comics and rabid fanbases doesn’t mean they belong together.
So, for example, you can cross Lego with Star Wars because both are playful and fun and are found in the toy aisle, but you can’t cross Barbie and Star Wars nearly as successfully because the brands stand for different things and appeal to wildly different audiences.
Cross Transformers and GI Joe or Batman and the Predator or even something absolutely ridiculous like Batman and Elmer Fudd and you get a good pairing.
Cross Eminem and the Punisher or Superman and Don Rickles or the very unlikely pairing of Marvel Comics and the soap opera Guiding Light, though, and you get something pretty silly.
So we’ll see a few months from now if Star Wars and Marvel go together like peanut butter and chocolate … or milk and mayonnaise. I have my suspicions it’ll be the latter.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been The Marketing Gateway. See ya next time!
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