Lesson #4: Tailor Your Product For The Time

“I think Batman has been out now four times, but I think they’ve lost sight of the fact that the first movie came up over ten years ago,” says McFarlane. “And the one thing that they’ve lost sight of is that we are all ten years older. So the audience that brought you in $300 million in that first movie, even if we were 12, we’re now 22. We’re now out of high school, we now have jobs, we now go to college, we’ve now been through three different relationships, we pay taxes, we know what the words ‘cancer’ and ‘death’ mean, so the world is a different place.”

One of the reasons McFarlane’s creations have been so successful is that he has constantly reassessed the market to which they are geared. He refuses to fall into the trap that he sees many others, including the Batman creators, have fallen into. “To give a 22 year old the exact same movie, and as a matter of fact, on some level, a little bit softer version of what they liked at 12, doesn’t compute to a 22 year old,” says McFarlane. “A 12 year old kid, the TV shows he watches, the music he listens to, the way he combs his hair, and the clothes he wears at 12, is not the same at 22. And somehow, to me, with that franchise, they’ve lost sight of that.”

So, if McFarlane were to take over the Batman franchise and create another $300 million hit again, what would he do differently? “Acknowledge that those 12 year olds are now over the age of 20, and so something that appeals to 20 year olds,” he says.

McFarlane cites his creation of “The Matrix” as an example of a success. While some critics suggest that the film’s R-rating helped boost its profits at the box office, and family-oriented films like “Batman” cannot have an R-rating, McFarlane says that is simply an excuse. “You just have to acknowledge that you’re not going to sell a bunch of pajamas, and you’re not going to sell happy meals, and then you can just make the movie that you want,” he says. “You’re free. You’re liberated by actually making the movie.”

Before McFarlane went to work on the sequel to his film “Spawn”, he carefully analyzed his target market. Data confirmed that 85 percent of the people who saw the film on its opening weekend were over the age of 14. “Well, add three or four years to them, and now you’re saying $17 million dollars on opening weekend was attributed to people who today will be 17 years old, or older,” says McFarlane. “So now it doesn’t matter, in my mind it doesn’t matter, if we have an R-rating. The core audience isn’t less than 15.”

Initially, New Line Studio executives, the very people behind the sequel, did not understand McFarlane’s rationale for having an R-rating. Eventually, however, they agreed. “So we can go to R and I don’t think we’ll skip a beat with it,” he says, “as long as R means we get a little more sophisticated with it, as long as the product is growing up, as the audience is growing up with it.’

Lesson #4: Tailor Your Product For The Time

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