Tmall.com, China’s largest third-party B2C platform for brands and retailers and a business of Alibaba Group has teamed up with The Walt Disney Company, America’s mass media and entertainment company to be the first exclusive distributor of their Marvel Studio’s 2015 blockbuster, Avengers: Age of Ultron (hereafter referred as ‘Avengers 2’) merchandise on Tmall.com. This is the first time Alibaba Group has opened up its resources in connecting brands and filmmakers to establish a convenient model in developing a movie-related merchandise market made available online for movie fans.
By leveraging Alibaba Group’s strong foundation of merchants and user base, Tmall.com partners with Taobao ticketing platform to collaborate with more than 40 premium brands including Audi, Lego, Ecovacs, Hasbro, Li Ning, etc., to bring a selection of genuine Avengers 2 merchandise to Chinese consumers as the movie opens yesterday in cinemas across China. These superhero themed merchandise are available on Disney’s flagship store on Tmall.com.
“We are pleased to be working with Disney and brands on Tmall to bring genuine movie merchandise to our online consumers. This marks another effort into further enhancing the collaboration between the participants within our platforms and to also fully utilize the resources we have across Alibaba,” said Tmall.com director of co-marketing Sherry Lang.
For the first time, Alibaba Group worked with Taobao ticketing platform and Tmall.com to establish a convenient connection between filmmakers and authorized intellectual property (IP) merchants on Tmall.com. This streamlined partnership will benefit filmmakers, merchants as well as movie fans to ensure that a wide selection of genuine movie merchandise is made available to online Chinese consumers through marketing projects.
The Avengers sequel topped US box office for the second weekend in a row with an estimated US$ 77.2 million according to Rentrak as of Sunday 10 May, 2015 and it opened in theatres in China yesterday.
