The LA Times with “Hollywood sees star qualities in classic games and toys”:

Welcome to Hollywood’s latest gold rush.

Movie studio development slates are rapidly filling up with projects based on well-known toys and games. Some high-profile projects in the works include ones based on the classic video game Asteroids, Lego building blocks, the View-Master toy, dolls Barbie and Stretch Armstrong, and board games Battleship, Ouija, Monopoly and Candy Land.

The practice of adapting famous source material into films has been employed since Hollywood’s early days, dating back to classics such as 1939′s “Gone With the Wind.”

Books, plays, short stories, comic books and video games have been adapted in large part because they offer a rich story and set of characters. The difference with many of the toys and games being turned into movies today is that they come with neither of those characteristics.

In exchange for what’s essentially a well-known brand name with a setting or theme and nothing more, studios are typically paying millions of dollars upfront and, should a movie get made, several percentage points of the movie’s gross receipts. That’s the kind of money that used to be offered only to A-listers.

“Brands are the new stars,” said Universal Pictures Chairman Marc Shmuger, whose studio has optioned Asteroids from Atari Inc. and Barbie from Mattel, and has a deal to develop movies based on multiple Hasbro Inc. products. “That’s what you used to pay the star, although fortunately they’re not as expensive.”

We’ve been down this line of discussion before — here and here to mention just a couple of posts — but it’s always interesting to read the actual words emerging from the actual mouths of actual studio executives. And when a movie studio chairman declares publicly, “Brands are the new stars,” you can be sure that reflects corporate thinking all around town.

A-list actors used to serve the same purpose, but their influence is waning as evidenced by the failure of recent star vehicles including “Imagine That,” starring Eddie Murphy, “Land of the Lost” with Will Ferrell, and Jack Black in “Year One.” The biggest hit of the summer was “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” in which most of the characters are 1980s action figures.

In the midst of a recession and ongoing decline in DVD sales, studio executives have become increasingly cautious about investing hundreds of millions of dollars to produce and market a tent-pole film. That has spurred them to look to toy and game brands for security.

“As of late, to get that tent-pole made you need an intellectual property that has a certain amount of unaided awareness just for starters,” said Chris Silbermann, president of talent agency International Creative Management.

Then check out the words coming from the prez of ICM: “unaided awareness.” That has to be some sort of buzz phrase that agents and producers use in pimping “Slinky: The Movie” to studios. Can’t you just hear them? “It’s a pre-branded brand!”

Classic toy and game brands can also summon fond memories. As the successful Abba musical “Mamma Mia!” showed, nostalgia can be a powerful force at the box office.

“I think that, for me, it’s as much connected with the feeling evoked by a brand as it is with the brand’s awareness,” said DreamWorks Chief Executive Stacey Snider, whose studio is developing the View-Master film. “The most successful brands are those that connect on an emotional level.”

More buzz words: “The most successful brands… connect on an emotional level.” So presumably the mere mention of View-Master gets people all caught up in weepy reverie? Evidently the good folks at DreamWorks think so.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the next 2-3 years, the onslaught of Marvel characters, toys, and game-based movies. We’ve had a torrent of these type of projects in the past. What’s coming up is a veritable tsunami.

But I still can’t help but think that the nearly equally important subtext roiling beneath the proclamations of studio chiefs about “brands are the new stars,” is that A-level actors aren’t. Perfect time to slap them — and their salaries — down to size.