NFTs in the Media Industry: The token-gated LOTR movie experience

📅 Around a month ago, Warner Bros. Discovery launched a movie on the blockchain. While this was a rather silent launch, it illustrates another approach for NFTs beyond a pure collectible - we did a deep dive on what we can learn from WB.

🍿 This wasn’t WB first experiment in Web3. As a film and entertainment studio they already started experimenting with NFT collectibles based on their IP/movie franchises with e.g. Space Jam, Matrix, Looney Tunes or the Conjuring last year. Starting with pure trading card collectibles they discovered more use cases e.g. physical toy redemptions and token-gated content.

💍 Now WB has created a movie experience bundled as an NFT with its “The Lord of the Rings the Fellowship of the Ring” movie and additional specials such as bonus content, hidden AR collectibles and similar on the Eluvio LIVE content blockchain and made it accessible only to holders of the NFTs. This is an application of token-gated media, where only holders of the NFT can watch the movie on the movieverse platform.

💸 The collection spans 10.999 NFTs with different rarity editions balancing accessibility for fans with having a sense of exclusivity: A mystery edition with 10k common, uncommon and rare NFTs priced at 30 USD and an epic edition with 999 ultra rares for 100 USD mint price.

📣 The collection was launched on the concurrently launched WB marketplace, Movieverse, where future WB NFT launches will be also expected. The launch also saw WB create a dedicated Twitter account for their NFT communication, hence the move is signaling a continued commitment to NFTs. Notably, besides the ring-fenced Twitter account and Web3 platform, there was little marketing, endorsement or press releases from the official/main WB brand.

🛒 Alongside the missing marketing and community management (Twitter account launched only 3 days prior to launch), the collection didn’t sell out (until now). So far, only ca 36% of the NFT has been minted, equal to a total sales value of $198k. Only the epic edition minted out and is demanded on the secondary market - almost 90% of the $124k secondary volume was due to the epic edition.

👪 Overall there was mixed feedback by the community. The main points of criticism centered around the drop being announced just days in advance, less than optimal technical implementation and finally a lack of understanding of Web3 culture. However, the LOTR superfans were activated and excited anyway.