What the summer of 1989 taught me about what licensing really is — and what it isn’t
In 1988, I was a licensing executive at Warner Bros. Consumer Products. And I can tell you firsthand: nobody thought Batman was going to work.
Not the studio. Not the retailers. Not the toy companies. Not the major consumer products brands you’d expect to be lining up to get a piece of a big summer movie.
Nobody.
The film was being produced in England, quietly, almost off the grid. Warner Bros. had agreed to make it, but confidence inside the studio was not exactly running high. They had Jack Nicholson. They had Michael Keaton — a choice that sent comic book fans into a fury; 50,000 protest letters arrived at the studio when the casting was announced. They had Tim Burton directing, the same guy who made Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. And they had Batman — a character who hadn’t been seen in live action since Adam West hung up the cape in 1968. Twenty years in the dark.
The studio had made promises to the producers that they’d make money on the film. But there wasn’t a lot of conviction behind those promises. The internal assessment, as I understood it, was that if the movie could sustain in theaters for six weeks, that would be a win.
Six weeks.
That was the bar we were working against when we were tasked with going out and finding companies to license the movie.
What “go find licensees” actually looked like
Let me tell you what the licensing landscape looked like in 1988, when we were trying to build a partner program around Batman.
Comic book characters were considered dead. That’s not an exaggeration — that was the consensus among major retailers and consumer products companies after a decade of Superman movies and the mountains of unsold Superman merchandise that had piled up in their warehouses. The Superman licensing program had been a disaster for a lot of companies. They had taken the bet, manufactured the products, put them on shelves, and watched them sit there. Nobody wanted more of that.
So when we went to the major toy companies — Kenner, Mattel, Hasbro — the answer was no. These were the biggest players in the industry. If any of them had taken the Batman master toy license, it would have been a signal to the entire market that this was a property worth betting on. But they weren’t interested. Comic book characters were dead, and nobody in their right mind was going to stake real money on a dark, brooding movie about a guy who wore a bat suit.
The major retailers weren’t interested either. The big apparel companies weren’t interested. The large consumer products brands weren’t interested.
What we were left with was essentially anyone willing to take a chance. Small companies. Startups. Entrepreneurs operating out of their garages. People who either didn’t know better, couldn’t get bigger licenses, or had enough instinct and hunger to see something the institutional players couldn’t see.
And the terms reflected how desperate the situation was. You could get a Batman license for five or ten thousand dollars in guaranteed minimum royalties. That’s not a typo. Five thousand dollars. For a Warner Bros. theatrical release.
We weren’t in a position to be choosy.
The companies that said yes
What happened next is something I’ve thought about for decades, because it contains one of the clearest lessons I’ve ever seen about what licensing actually does when it works.
The companies that said yes to Batman in 1988 — the small ones, the startups, the garage entrepreneurs — didn’t have the resources of Kenner or Mattel or Hasbro. What they had was motivation, flexibility, and an absence of the institutional risk-aversion that was making the big players say no.
One family company had been making bicycles for years. The sons had taken over the business and were looking for a way to grow it. They came to us about a Batman bicycle license. Since we were, frankly, grateful for anyone willing to take a chance, they got the deal — 8% royalty, $5,000 minimum guarantee. They went on to sell over $5 million worth of Batman bicycles in the following year.
Another entrepreneur put together a Batman bank — a blow-molded figure that would be sold not at retail, but as a premium item given away with Batman-licensed cereal from Quaker Oats. He had connections, he understood how to get a product produced, and he understood something clever: he didn’t have to sell his product to consumers directly if he could convince a major brand to use it as a promotional item. He generated millions of dollars without selling a single unit at retail.
A small company that made battery-operated ride-in vehicles for little kids — the kind you see in toy stores for $50 — took a Batman license and created a $150 ride-in Batmobile. Their sales took off like a bat out of hell.
Three partners who had started a printing company couldn’t get the licensing categories they wanted because they were already taken. So they invented their own category — something called a serigraph print, which is essentially a high-end silk-screen process that produces a collectible art piece. They licensed Batman and Looney Tunes for their serigraph prints, generated millions in revenue, and eventually became a vendor of record supplying the Warner Bros. Studio Stores. That licensing relationship opened doors to other major studio licenses they never would have had access to otherwise.
And then there was the master toy deal. With Kenner, Mattel, and Hasbro all saying no, an entrepreneur started a company in his garage and went to Warner Bros. to negotiate the rights for the Batman master toy license. That company was Toy Biz. Within three years, Toy Biz had become one of the largest toy companies in the United States.
Let that sink in. The biggest players in the toy industry looked at Batman and said no. A guy in a garage said yes. And three years later, that garage company was one of the largest toy companies in the country.
The shift nobody saw coming
Here’s what I remember about the period just before the movie opened.
We had done what we could. We had a licensing program — a modest one by any reasonable standard, built mostly on small companies and entrepreneurs who had been willing to take a risk that the institutional players wouldn’t. The studio hadn’t put enormous promotional muscle behind the movie launch. The internal expectation was still: six weeks in theaters, hope for the best.
And then something started to happen that nobody had planned for and nobody could have manufactured.
The fan base started to move.
Batman had a passionate, dedicated audience — the kind of audience that had been reading the comics, that had grown up with the character, that had watched what Frank Miller did with The Dark Knight Returns in 1986 and understood that Batman could be something dark and serious and genuinely compelling. That audience started talking. They started building anticipation. Word began spreading in ways that the studio’s marketing department hadn’t engineered and couldn’t control.
When the movie premiered on June 23, 1989, it didn’t slowly build. It exploded.
Batman became the first film in history to make $100 million in just ten days. The theatrical run that was supposed to last six weeks turned into one of the most dominant box office performances anyone had seen. Merchandise that had been sitting in modest quantities in stores was suddenly not enough. Demand exceeded supply across every product category simultaneously.
Stores that didn’t normally carry licensed merchandise — Macy’s — set up Batman displays. Counterfeit products flooded the market so fast that U.S. marshals were conducting raids, seizing more than 40,000 fake Batman shirts. Warner Bros. generated $500 million from licensed merchandise alone — more than the film made at the box office.
The small companies that had said yes when everyone else said no were suddenly sitting on something transformative. The bicycle company that had signed for $5,000 minimum and 8% royalty was selling millions in product. The garage entrepreneur who made the master toy deal was building one of the biggest toy companies in America.
And comic book characters — which the entire industry had written off as commercially dead — were suddenly the hottest licensing category in entertainment.
What this story is really about
I’ve told versions of this story at business schools, at MedTech conferences, at entrepreneurship programs, and to countless founders and IP owners over the years. And every time I tell it, the same point lands the same way.
The value was always there. Batman was always Batman. The IP didn’t change between 1988, when nobody would touch it, and 1989, when everyone wanted a piece of it. What changed was the commercial moment — and who was positioned to capture it when it arrived.
The major toy companies, the big retailers, the large consumer brands — they missed one of the most significant commercial moments in licensing history not because they lacked resources or relationships or market intelligence. They missed it because their institutional frameworks told them comic book characters were dead, and they weren’t willing to challenge that assumption.
The companies that won were the ones small enough and hungry enough to say yes when the answer was supposed to be no. And they won not because they were smarter than Kenner or Mattel or Hasbro. They won because they were in the game.
You can’t capture the commercial moment if you’re not positioned when it arrives.
The lesson that goes deeper than Batman
Here’s what I’ve come to understand from being inside that experience — and from the work I’ve done since, helping IP owners, startups, and businesses build licensing programs across medical devices, technology, entertainment, consumer products, and more.
Most IP owners are waiting for conditions to be perfect before they engage their licensing system. They’re waiting for the right moment, the right partner, the right market signal. They’re doing what the major toy companies did in 1988: looking at the evidence in front of them and concluding that the risk isn’t worth it.
But licensing doesn’t work that way. The value inside IP rarely announces itself in advance. Commercial moments don’t wait for everyone to feel confident. Markets don’t signal their readiness before they shift.
The companies that built real businesses from Batman in 1989 weren’t the ones with the most resources. They were the ones who had built their foundation — their manufacturing relationships, their distribution connections, their operational infrastructure — and then added a licensing relationship on top of it. The license became the accelerant. The infrastructure they already had became the engine.
That’s what a licensing system does. It doesn’t just generate royalty income. It positions IP owners — and licensees — to capture the commercial moment when it comes. It builds the relationships, the market presence, the partner network, and the operational readiness that converts a cultural shift into a business result.
The fan base built the buzz that launched Batman. But the companies with licenses were the only ones in a position to benefit from it.
Being in the game isn’t everything. But it’s the one thing you can’t win without.
What happened after
The summer of 1989 changed the entertainment licensing industry permanently. Comic book characters went from dead to dominant almost overnight. The infrastructure that Warner Bros. Consumer Products had been building — quietly, without much confidence, with modest licensing partners who couldn’t get anyone better — became the foundation for what grew into a multi-billion dollar franchise.
Every major entertainment studio in Hollywood watched what happened with Batman and drew the same conclusion: licensed merchandise isn’t an afterthought to the movie. In the right circumstances, it can generate more revenue than the theatrical release. The Batman film made $251 million at the box office and $500 million in licensed merchandise.
The business model of entertainment licensing was never the same after that.
And the entrepreneurs — the bicycle company, the toy company started in a garage, the husband and wife teams who built ride-in Batmobiles and limited edition prints — they went from small operations to serious businesses not because they were geniuses or because they had superior resources. They went there because they said yes when the question was still uncertain, built their operational foundation, and were ready when the moment came.
That’s the licensing lesson from the summer of 1989 that I’ve never forgotten.
The value is usually there before anyone can see it. The system is what positions you to capture it.
About the author: Rand Brenner is CEO of the Licensing Consulting Group and a licensing systems thinker with decades of experience in entertainment, technology, consumer products, and MedTech licensing. He was a licensing executive at Warner Bros. Consumer Products, where he worked the Batman and Batman II film licensing programs, and later served as Vice President of Licensing at Saban Entertainment, where he managed a $100 million licensing division for the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers franchise.
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Rand Brenner is an IP professional whose passion is helping inventors, startups, and businesses use licensing to turn their IP into income-producing products, services, and technologies. His decades of experience run the gamut from medical devices to food technology to consumer products. He’s licensed some of the biggest Hollywood entertainment blockbusters, including the Batman Movies (1 and 2) and the number one kid’s action TV show, the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Rand speaks about licensing and is a featured speaker at investment conferences, trade shows, colleges, and startup events. His first book, Hidden Wealth: The Money-Making Power of Licensing, was released in 2019 and is available on Amazon.com. He’s also a published writer, and his articles have appeared in several prestigious trade magazines, including The Licensing Journal, Intellectual Property Magazine, and License India.
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