The Darkness videogame, which released on June 26th, has been getting big sales behind a major marketing campaign (see 'Darkness Videogame Premieres in June'). We spoke to Top Cow Productions president Matt Hawkins about what that means to sales of the comic products and other topics.
We've heard some of the major retailers are already sold out of the videogame?
Yeah, we've gotten reports from EB, Gamestop and Target saying they've already sold out of The Darkness videogame.
We hear you're expecting to hit a million pieces of this product?
Worldwide, that's the projection. The initial orders are less than half that, but they're getting massive reorders right now. It's really exciting; I'm pretty stoked.
What do you think this will do to sales of the comic products?
The comic book is all over the game. There's unlockable content in the game where you can download various issues of the comic and read it for free. It also has a lot of the artwork unlockable in various places. The story is pretty much the story of the Resurrection trade that Paul Jenkins wrote for us. It was volume 4 of the Darkness trades. We're hoping to have a direct spillover effect.
What we're hoping is just like when we had the Witchblade TV series on TNT, we saw a bump in the bookstore sales, but not much in the direct market. In terms of the individual comic books, the sales were the same. We had hoped for more and inventoried more, but we didn't see any enormous spikes, but we did see huge spikes in our Barnes and Noble and Borders sales, I mean huge.
We've seen bookstore sales going crazy on manga that are based on videogames when something happens in the videogame world.
We've got a deal with Bandai where they've been repackaging our material into a sort of manga format, even though it's the existing Top Cow style in how we do our books. As with Witchblade and Tomb Raider, we're releasing content in the direct market in the book stores and our regular trade paperback format, and then Bandai is releasing a lot of the content later, and they intend to release some of The Darkness trades in the digest format later this year.
You mentioned unlockable content in the videogames, what kind of content is in there?
Darkness Volume 1 #1, Darkness Volume 2 #1, also pretty much any #1 that we've done, even newer ones like Hunt or Kill #1, Necromancer #1, Witchblade #1. They did a really nice job of building it up to where it's very viewable and it's easy to read. They developed their own custom reader on the system. They also included The Darkness Level books, which we did a four issue mini and a #0, so it's actually a 5-issue miniseries that directly corresponded to the various levels within the game. All five of those books are available as unlockable content as well.
The Comic Shop Locator is in the packaging?
Inside the case for both the PS3 and Xbox 360 games, there's a little booklet telling people how to play the game, and there's only one ad in that and it's a Top Cow ad which shows the Comic Shop Locator Service and features The Darkness Ultimate Collection. We did a special trade paper back that includes volume 1 and 4 of The Darkness and that's the Garth Ennis/Mark Sylvestri run, and the Paul Jenkins/Dale Keown run. It's basically the best of the series of the 80 or 90 issues that we've published, and that collection is called the Ultimate Collection, and we're featuring that for fans, because that's a very good jumping on point. It's also featuring the statue that I did with Mike Horn that hasn't come out yet and Darkness Compendium, which is the 50-issue volume. There are three items that are highlighted in there, and we chose to not drive people directly to our e-commerce site, we specifically drove people to the Comic Shop Locator Service, and that's in every game that's going out.
Did you place extra copies of The Ultimate Collection, for example, in bookstores in anticipation of demand from the ad in the game booklet?
Yes, we made pretty specific deals with Barnes and Noble and Borders. I've been in quite a few Barnes and Nobles, and they tend to have both The Ultimate Collection and The Compendium editions right now, those are the two books that seem to be available in all the bookstores.
Anything else going on with the property? Isn't there also a movie?
Yeah, our film partner Scott Rosenberg at Platinum has a four slate picture deal that he's developing at Arclight. The first film to get made is Witchblade, a live action feature, and what they're trying to do with that is have The Darkness featured in the Witchblade film and then spin The Darkness out of that.
So The Darkness might be the second one?
That's the intent. I know the first film in the slate deal is actually being made; it will be called Unique, and it's being made right now.
Is there anything else we should know about The Darkness right now?
I was blown away when 2K came back and said they had a $4 million advertising campaign, the majority of which would be featured on TV. The ads have been running pretty regularly on late night TV and in evening time on Spike, BET, TNT, Sci-Fi and ESPN. I've seen a couple run on MTV and they've been running on pretty much every
All in all we're really happy. We've got the Witchblade animated series coming out this fall, we've got The Darkness videogame just released, and we've got the Wanted film being shot right now in Prague with a phenomenal cast -- you can't get much better than Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman and James McAvoy. On the mass media front, Mark and I are very happy about Top Cow's present and future.
It's just very exciting for us, because we've never had a videogame bassed on one of our characters before. It's exciting because the only real videogames based on comic characters are the Marvel and DC ones. To have a 20 million game come out when all is said and done with marketing and all that, and then have it be successful, I think is pretty cool.