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Marvel’s Avengers: Endgame , which released last Friday in India, has created history with the highest opening ever for a Hollywood movie, and the third highest opening ever for any film in India. The first week collections are likely to cross ₹250 crore, according to BookMyShow, which says it has sold over 5.5 million tickets for the film, contributing over 51 per cent of the film’s overall net box office collection so far.
File photo
Not surprisingly, a host of brands — Audi, Peter England, PayTm to name some — are circling around the movie, hosting screenings, holding contests on social media and generally piggybacking on the movie’s mega success.
Facebook in refresh mode
Controversy-ridden Facebook unveiled a host of new initiatives at its annual F8 developer conference aimed at combating harassment and data privacy infringement issues.
At the conference attended by more than 5,000 developers and entrepreneurs from around the world, CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged the dent in reputation the social media giant has suffered on privacy and said from now FB would build products and run the company in a fundamentally different way.
The company unveiled a re-engineered messaging app that would be lighter and faster as well as make it possible for people to watch videos together; a fresh new design — FB5 — for Facebook; use of artificial intelligence to curb hate speeches; some more progress on its VR solutions as well as new features for Instagram.
For marketers, the roll-out that would be of interest is the Marketplace announcement that people could soon be able to ship items anywhere in the US and pay for their purchases directly on FB. Though still limited to the US market, its impact could be high as sellers could access more buyers.
Meanwhile on Instagram, users could soon shop directly from creators without leaving the platform. Testing will begin next week with a small group of creators and users can just tap on the screen to see the creations and buy on the spot.
Yoga deal
Indian yoga and wellness start-up SARVA has attracted investments from pop icon Jennifer Lopez, baseball star Alex Rodriguez and Bollywood diva Malaika Arora. The three, along with Zumba®, the largest branded fitness programme in the world, have come together to invest in SARVA, started by young entrepreneur Sarvesh Shashi, though the release does not disclose the size of investments. SARVA currently has 91 studios across India, clustering Mumbai, Delhi, and Bengaluru.It plans to expand into other metros and is also evaluating market opportunities in the US, the UK, and West Asia. According to the company, the global wellness market is pegged at $4.2 trillion, the fitness, mind and body segment accounts for $595 billion and the global yoga market constitutes $80 billion.
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