Five Things You Absolutely Did Not Know About the Highest Grossing Franchises of All Time
Bean Bun Man is more popular than Harry Potter
Wikipedia’s List of Highest-Grossing Media Franchises is mostly just a list of dull box office figures and an overrepresentation of the phrase “The Walt Disney Company.” But a closer inspection reveals a few baffling facts I certainly didn’t see coming.
The Sixth-Highest Grossing Franchise Is a Picture Book You’ve Never Read
Have you ever heard of Anpanman? If you’re from Japan, you absolutely have. If you’re in America, it’s exceedingly hard to consume any Anpanman media. There are English dubs of 10 of his moves — available exclusively on Tubi, which like, come on. There are more English-language anime episodes, but they all run on Pogo TV, an unholy amalgam of Warner Bros., Discovery and Cartoon Network that only runs in India. One manga has been translated, but it’s used more as an aid to help Japanese kids learn English.
And buddy, we are missing out. Anpanman translates to Bean Bun Man — he’s a superhero whose brain is a red bean paste made by the kindly baker Uncle Jam. Anpanman teams up with various food friends — the show holds the Guinness World Record for the most characters in an animated franchise — to fight off a freak-ass little virus named Baikinman. It was created by writer and illustrator Takashi Yanase, who grew up almost constantly starving during World War II and literally dreamed of red bean paste.
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And what do we have stateside — Captain America? A scrawny dweeb who took government drugs so everyone would like him? Our favorite franchises say a lot about our respective cultures.
Star Wars Has Made Over a Billion Dollars Selling Books
George Lucas learned the number one lesson of making any global media franchise: start selling toys ASAP. Twenty-nine of Star Wars’ staggering $46 billion in revenue have come from licensed merchandise — and that doesn’t even count the half mill some collector recently shelled out for an original Boba Fett doll. They’ve also raked in over $10 billion at the box office, and another $4 billion from video games.
But Lucas was diligently pumping out weird little books for over 30 years as well. Known as the Star Wars Expanded Universe, it consisted of full-length novels, children’s books and everything in between. They even have their own dork version of “Anno Domini” and “Before Christ” — ABY and BBY, or Before / After the Battle of Yavin.
When Disney threw $4 billion at Lucasfilm in 2012, they made it clear that stuff like, let’s say, Luke Skywalker having sex with a ghost can absolutely not be canon. They tossed everything they didn’t like in a box labeled “Star Wars Legends,” and said: You can still buy our books, but none of this shit ever happened.
Winnie the Pooh Is Worth More Than Almost Any Franchise You Can Think Of
Harry Potter? Star Wars? The damn MCU? Winnie the Pooh has raked in more cash than any franchise on the planet other than Mickey Mouse and Pokemon.
The silly old bear has made $214 million at the box office, another $40 million from DVD and Blu-ray, and — ex-fucking-scuse me? $48 billion in retail sales. This franchise has been trucking along since 1924, but they had to wait until 1986 to have a breakout $100 million sales year. Then, in 1997, they raked in $4 billion, and never looked back. Ever since, they haven’t gone more than four years without breaking a billion bucks.
At this point, they could afford to get Eeyore and Tigger the medication they so desperately need, but are instead choosing to profit off their mental illness.
Pokemon Has Made Millions in ‘Jet Aircraft Livery Sales’
“Weird little magic animals that talk poorly but fight ruthlessly” is the most lucrative idea a human being has ever had. Their $98 billion valuation is made up mainly of licensed merchandise ($91 billion), mobile games ($6 billion) and movies (a paltry $1 billion at the box office).
Looking at their list of income sources, one of these things is not like the other. Since 1998, there have only been four bleak years when there hasn’t been a Pokemon-themed Boeing 747 gracing the skies. To cash in on the popularity of the first Pokemon movie, Japanese airline All Nippon Airways got an ensemble cast of pocket monsters painted on two of their jets. They were so popular that the company scrambled to get more painted. In recent years, other companies have gotten in on the action, ordering more specific illustrations of just Pikachu, just Vulpix, and in one baffling case, just Exeggutor, a fat-bodied three-headed coconut tree.
All told, Pokemon has made about $3 million from the 21 jets bearing their adorable little freaks.
Disney Profited Off of Racism One Last Time
It may shock you to learn that Walt Disney was kind of a jerk. The guy testified against his own employees in Congress, declaring under oath that if they were union, they were communists. He ordered his animators to lampoon those same union employees as evil clowns in Dumbo. He even hosted a Nazi propagandist right after Kristallnacht.
And that’s just the stuff he thought no one would notice. He went out of his way to produce some vile, racist garbage for the world to consume on a massive scale. Song of the South was a cheerful, feature-length whitewashing of the institution of slavery, painting it as a fun and collaborative effort. He casually included appallingly racist caricatures in just about every classic animation: the crows in Dumbo, the Native Americans in Peter Pan, the centaur from Fantasia.
In modern decades, the power brokers at the top of the company have wisely decided to edit some of these out, slap warnings on them or take them off of platforms like Disney+ and Hulu altogether. The latter move was actually part of a deliberate money-making scheme. In 2023, Disney carved a bunch of “underperforming” content from their streaming platforms — a mix of stuff no one was watching, and the embarrassingly outdated stuff mentioned above. They even took a nearly $2 billion dollar hit — an “impairment charge” reflected in an updated valuation of their platforms, now that it had less content than before.
But this wasn’t out of the goodness of Bob Iger’s heart. It was an investment in his future bonuses — with that content gone, they suddenly have less residuals and less taxes to pay, every year, until the sun swallows the Earth.
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