While The Five-Year Engagement with Jason Segal and Emily Blunt is poised to take top spot at the box office this weekend, the real fan/brand frenzy is a week away.

Prepare yourselves for Hype Overload: Marvel’s The Avengers movie is opening on May 4th and the plan is for the company to have more than 600 (!) pieces of merchandise tied to the film at Walmart alone. You can be sure every character — Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, The Hulk, Hawkeye and Black Widow — will get his or her toys, gear, and apparel as part of the merchandising blitz.

A great deal, if not all, of these products will be found in the aisles of Walmart, where fans of the film will also be able to use a nifty augmented-reality app tied to the film in order to locate the Marvel-ous merchandise (and not just on a T-Mobile phone, as shown in Walmart's video above).Continue reading...

In just a couple weeks, after the Hunger Games hype has died down, Hollywood's Hunger Games will begin. That's right, it's blockbuster season already, kids! Sequels, superheroes, sequels about superheroes — it's all coming to a popcornplex near your. But, as with each subsequent summer movie season, the movies with something really on the line are the tie-in brands.

Brandchannel's early scorecard look at which tie-in has the odds in its favor:Continue reading...