I’m standing next to a cemetery and the smell of freshly dug earth permeates the air. Nearby a man walks past with a blue face and green skin while another has an arrow lodged firmly in his forehead. “Welcome to the afterlife!” someone trills as they dart by.
Fortunately, it’s not really the afterlife. I’m actually on a set at Warner Bros.’s Leavesden Studios, just outside London, where around me crew and cast are scurrying around trying to lock in various shots on a Beetlejuice-themed Carmax commercial.
On one side of the studio there’s a tiny model town complete with miniature cars and people (later a crewmember will use a tiny, business card-sized clapper board to mark the shot while another pulls the tiny car with a string) while on the other side is a life-size set of a “Beetlemax” dealership with the obligatory cemetery next door.
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The inspiration for the shoot, which is helmed by veteran commercial director Ulf Johansson, is “what if Beetlejuice ran a used car dealership?” Which is why the lobby of the dealership is filled with dead customers (including the aforementioned man with an arrow through his head) while the staff are comprised of “Shrinkers” (people who’ve had their heads shrunk).
The shoot is the result of a creative collaboration between Carmax and the Warner Bros. Pictures marketing team, which is why Carmax have been given the use of the Leavesden studio as well as access to original props and costumes from both the original “Beetlejuice” movie and its sequel. “Carmax is all about the way car buying should be,” says Dana Nussbaum, executive vice president of worldwide marketing at Warner Bros. Pictures. “So what if you flip that on its head? What would it look like if Beetlejuice ran the place?”
“Carmax are incredible partners, and we really went wild with that one, and really took this idea of tapping into the world of Beetlejuice and bringing that to life… it was really about making sure that everything felt very authentic to the film, to the look, to the feel, to the way the Shrinkers move about in the world.”
While the Carmax commercial is perhaps the one in which Warner Bros. have been most directly involved (Tim Burton personally OK’d the creative), it’s one of a number of partnerships the studio’s marketing team have put together to accompany the launch of “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” which premiered in Venice last month and debuted globally this weekend, taking in $145.4 million worldwide.
Among them are “Beetlejuice”-inspired commercials from insurance company Progressive and deodorant brand Secret, food and beverage collaborations with Denny’s and Fanta (including a new Beetlejuice-inspired flavor) and cosmetics tie-ins with Nyx and Sally Hansen.
Ahead of the movie’s debut, Nussbaum sat down with Variety to talk about how those marketing deals are made, how involved the studio team gets (including taste tests!) and what it takes to bring the afterlife to life.
It actually happens both ways. Oftentimes there’s partners we’ve worked with in the past, like Progressive, that we have an existing relationship with, and will sometimes go back to, but then when we’re thinking about the campaign, we’re always thinking about, “What are the core audiences that we want to reach and how do we reach out to them in ways that feel really personal and fresh and new?”
Oftentimes after we drop the first piece of content or put out a first look we will have brands come to us and say, “This could be an interesting fit for us.” And what I love about it is that they’re not always brands that would be an obvious choice. And I think that’s sometimes where we get the most incredible campaigns. When you look at the brand partners that we have on “Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice,” I think that’s a common thread that you’ll see throughout everything, is that they’re all very different. They’re in different lines of business, they reach different types of audience, but the one common thread is that they are all willing to be really playful and creative with their own brand and really create something with us. And that was really important to us.
It’s very different for each partner. As you saw with Carmax, we really did take the spirit of Beetlejuice. And I think the lens which we looked at all of the partners through was, what would it look like if you brought the afterlife to life? What does the everyday activity or product or brand look like through that lens of this wildly imaginative, deliciously devious world that Tim Burton has created in this movie? As much as we want everything to be true to the film, we also want it to be true to the brand and to be really, really authentic. So having that be the throughline allowed us to be flexible in that way and really nimble.
Each deal is slightly different. They all have slightly different parameters, depending on whether it’s a product or not. So it really does depend.
We’re in the weeds on all of it and honestly, we love it. Particularly on this film the little details are what bring the magic. We’re the stewards of a brand that is a beloved and incredibly iconic film, and given the responsibility and privilege of bringing that back to life and introducing it to a new generation, the attention to detail was incredibly, incredibly important.
I did not personally test the new Fanta flavor, but I believe members of the team actually did. There’s over a billion cans on market; we went through the look of every single one, making sure that the colors are exactly right and everything feels spot on to the way that we’re selling the film. And the Denny’s menu, we sat down and went item by item through it with their menu team, and actually created that so, yes, definitely the attention to detail is so important.
We share everything with Tim and his team, yeah, and they’ve been absolutely incredible. Every piece has really gone through them. And again, they’ve given us a lot of creative freedom, which has been wonderful. They are incredible partners and they’ve been in this with us lockstep every step of the way.
We learned a tremendous amount from “Barbie.” We were really bold in the different categories that we went after in terms of partners and really cast a wide net there. And I think it’s how we came to find such success with partners like Progressive, who are obviously back again this time with an incredibly delightful campaign about insuring even a possessed town, so there have been so many learnings from that campaign. But I think the number one thing we learned with “Barbie” is really about listening to our audiences and letting our audiences be part of this journey and part of this creation. And really just world-building. That’s something that we did successfully on “Barbie” and I think that it’s exactly what we’re setting out to do here. It’s obviously a very, very different world, but I think it’s also a world that people can respond to. This idea of owning who you are — whether it’s wacky and weird and wild, that that’s not only okay, but it’s to be celebrated — is a really, really special thing.
We have “A Minecraft Movie” coming up next April, and then we have “Superman” in the summer. We also have “F1” so there’s quite a few different projects that we have coming up. So lots of work to do!
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
Check out Carmax’s “Beetlejuice”-inspired commercial below:
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