In recent times, there’s been a shift in how brands advertise movies. The pre-release strategy has evolved beyond traditional communications, becoming a whole a whole cultural phenomenon (Barbie, Wicked, Marty Supreme, A24 to name a few). Studios are designing collaboration strategies across beauty, fashion, food, travel, and tech to drive cultural relevance before a movie comes to our screens.
But scale has outpaced strategy. The 2025 COTY report with Tracksuit found that while collaborations have become one of marketing’s loudest languages, most brands still struggle to get it right. As a result, studios and brand partners are rushing into collaborations without a clear strategy or insight for what effective collaboration actually looks like, or how to build meaning, not just momentum.
The result is a landscape saturated with partnerships that spark visibility, yet struggle to build lasting resonance. Within that tension lies the deeper story: film marketing has become both a case study in cultural reach and a warning about the diminishing returns of over-collaboration.
This case study is in partnership with Tracksuit, analysing key findings from their 2025 COTY research with Bimma Williams.
Traditional Media Dominance
For decades, audiences discovered new films almost entirely by traditional media. Studios with bigger budgets would invest in 30-second TV spots, saturating prime-time shows, major sports broadcasts, and cable networks months ahead of release. Trailers weren’t just content, they were designed to create familiarity through repetition and scale.
Discovery and awareness also happened in rented physical spaces. Billboards and posters dominated high-traffic environments, print was popular, with film ads, interviews, and critic quotes appearing in newspapers and magazines to lend credibility and reach mass audiences.
Brand collaborations, of course, aren’t new. For decades, movie releases have been accompanied by fast-food promotions, toy licensing, and retail exclusives, particularly in family films and franchise cinema.
Image © McDonalds, 2001
More recently, what’s changed isn’t the presence of collaboration, but its purpose. Today’s partnerships shape how a film is styled, framed, and culturally embedded long before release. This mirrors a broader shift in brand marketing, where cultural adjacency, community signalling, and aesthetic world-building increasingly outweigh reach alone.
The Success of Barbie
In 2023, what began as a single, pink billboard with only a date and recognisable branding soon became the blueprint for movie marketing collaborations. Long before release, Barbie’s marketing team announced not just a film, but a Barbie brand universe no-one could escape from. Backed by a reported $100 million marketing investment, the film did not simply enter the market, it recalibrated the mechanics of movie marketing itself.
Barbie marketing in 2023
In the months leading up to launch, the campaign rolled out more than 165 brand partnerships and licensing deals which were strategically considered to reflect what Barbie would use in the real world.
Notable brands across fashion, beauty, travel, lifestyle, and beyond included Xbox, NYX Cosmetics, Aldo, Zara, AirBnB etc. The team didn’t only promote a movie, it engineered an ambient cultural presence. The brand took over timelines, storefronts, menus, wardrobes, and conversations.
From a collaboration strategy perspective, Barbie worked because it balanced two principles that research into the collaboration economy increasingly validates: truth and surprise. The partnerships felt authentic to the film’s world and brand DNA, yet ambitious in cultural reach. The result wasn’t just awareness, but participation. Whether you watched the movie or not, their collaboration strategy was unforgettable.
Grace Kortegast, Brand Partnerships Manager, Tracksuit further explains:
“Sustained brand growth comes from clarity and consistency over time. Brand partnerships are no exception. A single collaboration moment rarely changes a brand’s long term trajectory on its own, but with a clear role in a wider strategy, they’re one of the strongest amplification levers available. At Tracksuit, without exception, our strongest results have come from long term partners.”
Barbie’s movie campaign also demonstrated that ambient cultural dominance can outperform traditional media saturation. We were entertained through Barbie’s marketing, generating cultural value well before opening weekend. It could be argued that because of their marketing campaign and collaboration strategy, Barbie went on to become 2023’s highest-grossing film globally, earning $1.44 billion at the box office.
Image © Barbie’s Malibu DreamHouse with Airbnb
The prowess of the cultural movement was also reflected by the data. In 2023, Tracksuit surveyed nearly 20,000 consumers across the US, UK, AU and NZ, asking them: Which entertainment or consumer events did you see or hear the most about in 2023?
When they compiled the results, the Barbie film came out on top as the most prominent entertainment or consumer event, capturing a major share of the vote (20 to 30%) of respondents in every market.
Tracksuit wrote an article explaining why different brand collaborations work. Read it here.
Wicked’s marketing campaign was strategically Gravity-Defying
Drawing inspiration from Barbie’s 100+ brand collaboration effort, Wicked strategically covered almost every industry. From fashion, beauty and lifestyle to toys, home décor, food & drink, publishing and more, we were immersed into a pink and green world which really brought the Wicked storyline to life.
Image © Beis x Wicked
The impact was measurable across attention, commerce, and culture:
- Fashion partnerships alone generated $27 million in Media Impact Value (MIV)
- Search interest for Wicked rose 60% from February 2024
- It delivered the studio’s third-largest opening weekend of 2024
- More than 2 billion shopper interactions and 25 billion global impressions were generated
- The film has grossed $114 million domestically and $164.2 million globally for Universal Pictures
Image © Vogue Business
Wuthering Heights Enters The Playbook
Earlier this year, Warner Bros. opened 2026 with Wuthering Heights, applying a more restrained version of the collaboration-led playbook. The volume of partnerships was smaller than the category takeovers seen with Barbie or Wicked, but the brands that did participate were invited to build meaningfully within the film’s world, rather than simply borrow its attention.
We’re now seeing an increase from studios translating heritage IP into the language of modern culture. In this context, collaboration becomes a cultural access point, and, if misaligned, a reputational risk.
The most effective partnerships, however, aren’t built on cultural observation alone. They are anchored in strategic alignment, shared values, and clear commercial intent, creating relevance consumers can feel, not just moments they can recognise.
According to Tracksuit, Wuthering Heights most effective collaboration was with Maude, achieving a score of 92 on its Collaborations Index for strengthening the narrative world of the film, translating story into physical experience, and demonstrating strong emotional and strategic fit.
Image © Maude
As audiences become more discerning, the partnerships that will endure are those that build long-term brand equity, cultural credibility, and measurable commercial impact, not just momentary attention.
Grace Kortegast, Brand Partnerships Manager, Tracksuit comments:
“A one-off collab lands, the brand sees a spike in awareness or recall, and the team calls it a win. But six months later, consideration hasn’t shifted and preference hasn’t moved. Whether a brand has driven long term growth beyond the short term hype is what always-on tracking can measure and prove.”
Tracksuit has launched a guide to brand building through collaborations, developed with Bimma Williams.
Download The COLLAB brand collaboration framework
Building Cultural Impact Through Brand Partnerships
As collaborations increase with movie releases, their effectiveness becomes uneven. Research into the collaboration economy shows that volume does not always equal impact, audiences quickly tune out when every film feels like a partnership opportunity.
Truth + Surprise, Not Just Hype
Tracksuit and Bimma Williams’s research found that the most impactful collaborations weren’t just bold; they were both authentic and unexpected. Truth without surprise is forgettable; surprise without truth is a gimmick. For movie collaborations, this means the best partnerships occur where the brand’s identity genuinely overlaps with the film’s world, not merely where a logo lands on a limited-edition product.
Frameworks Over Instinct
The COLLAB Index highlights what separates genuine hits from superficial hype. Tracksuit and Bimma developed a scoring framework across six dimensions; Chemistry, Originality, Legacy, Leadership, Audience Engagement, and Brand Energy. These are measurable indicators of whether a partnership will shift perception or simply generate a fleeting news cycle. Studios and brand partners can use this framework as a pre-campaign check before committing.
When done right, collaborations are selective, intentional, and emotionally resonant. They extend the story, reinforce brand alignment, and create cultural moments audiences want to inhabit.
Image © Marty Supreme x Wheaties
What This Means For Marketers
Partnerships with other brands have become increasingly popular within the movie marketing industry, extending reach far beyond traditional media into everyday cultural touchpoints.
Thoughtfully curated collaborations translate a film’s world into products and experiences that feel natural to the partner brand, driving both cultural relevance and commercial return. The strongest partnerships are defined less by scale than by alignment, shared audiences, values, and tone, where the return is not just exposure, but sustained brand equity for both sides.
Movie marketing has evolved from simple trailers and posters into multi-channel, collaboration-driven ecosystems that blur the lines between film, culture, and commerce.
From Barbie to Wicked and Wuthering Heights, studios are leveraging brand partnerships to build worlds, extend narratives, and spark participation long before release. Yet as tie-ins multiply, so does collaboration fatigue: audiences are increasingly discerning, and scale without strategy risks generating noise rather than impact.
Image © The Boston Globe published a mock engagement announcement for characters played by Zendaya and Robert Pattinson to promote their A24 film ‘The Drama’.
Measuring the value of brand collaborations comes down to choosing the right data partner to ensure that brand collaborations are intentional, measurable, and culturally resonant.
Great collaborations don’t only create moments, they generate future demand. By continuously tracking performance, Tracksuit shows whether a partnership is building the long-term brand equity that drives growth, making it possible to justify the investment, optimise future collaborations, and confidently prove its value to the CFO.
