Angry Birds gets Hollywood-sized marketing budget

The next game from Finnish studio Rovio may just outshine Q1’s biggest boxed game releases when it releases movie tie-in Angry Birds Rio next week.

The smartphone app, which takes the original Angry Birds and themes it around 20th Century Fox bird film Rio, launches on March 22nd – and is poised to do well thanks to support from a Hollywood movie-sized marketing budget.

No other game has been marketed with this kind of approach before,” the firm’s Peter Vesterbacka told MCV.

A game like ours is getting supported by a big Hollywood movie budget.”

The studio announced the game earlier in the year, with a dedicated Super Bowl trailer which focused more on the Angry Birds partnership than the film itself.

It’s almost like we have our own movie – Fox is spending $100m in the US alone on advertising. That machinery behind us is in full force and is huge. We’ll be reaching thousands of cinemas across the world, and there’s a TV campaign – that means more people will download the game than ever. It’s a great way of getting the message out. It also means we are providing those new people with a great game experience. We think it will be really exciting to see how it works.

It will be interesting to see how that impacts the download numbers. We have big expectations for Angry Birds Rio.”

The original Angry Birds, although priced at just 59p, has been downloaded over 100m times and generated over 40m in revenues globally in the last 12 months.