One thing I enjoy doing each day is coming up with hypothetical promotions for movies that are

set to release this year, mainly because I’m a creative at heart and enjoy coming up with fun

ideas—it’s also good to add to the portfolio.  The one promotion I’m really excited about is the

one I’m writing about today, because the Harry Potter franchise is something I’ve always been

very fond of, so when I heard that the Fantastic Beasts movie was going to be released in 2016, I

started conjuring up some promotional ideas that I think would highlight the film in the best way

possible. 

The promotion I was most excited about was pairing up Fantastic Beasts with the Wizarding

World Of Harry Potter, but not in the most obvious way because that would be boring and

unimaginative.  Since Easter falls on Sunday, March 27th, I thought it would be a great idea to

host an Easter egg hunt at both Wizarding World parks on Saturday, March 26th.  I’m aware that

the Los Angeles park doesn’t officially open to the public until April 7th; however, I’m sure we

could work something out where we allow 250 or so super fans into the park for our Easter

promotion.  Universal has been allowing a few people into the park already, so I don’t think this

would be too big of a problem.

We would reach out to our Fantastic Beasts online fan base through our social media sites, and

anyone who “likes” or retweets or shares something special with us that we ask of them would

be entered into the egg hunt.  Ideally, we would want to focus on kids and families that are

looking forward to the film, so finding that special connection would be crucial to the success of

our promotion. We could also do an online version for the people who can’t come to the park,

but I’m going to focus on the tie-in with the Wizarding World park today. 

We would plant 250 eggs at each park, but we put special Fantastic Beasts cards in 54 of the

eggs, and that number just happens to be the number of beasts in the actual book itself.  The

other 196 eggs would contain Chocolate Frog Cards--Newt’s card in the Harry Potter novels. 

Those who are fortunate enough to find one of the 54 eggs would then be entered into our grand-

prize drawing of attending the premiere in Los Angeles, while the other 53 people who don’t win

the grand-prize would walk away with Fantastic Beasts prizes or ROE’s to see the film when it

comes out.  Another alternative to the prizes and ROE’s would be to give them the option of

attending an advanced screening at a theater near them, which our Field teams could

accommodate.

In my personal opinion, this would be a great promotion for Fantastic Beasts, because it would

give our film fantastic publicity 8 months in advance of its release, in addition to reaching our

core market demographic.  Not only would it highlight Fantastic Beasts, it would also be a great

promotion for the grand opening of the Wizarding World Of Harry Potter in Los Angeles that

just so happens to open two weeks after our Easter egg hunt event would occur.