Pokemon beats Star Wars as highest grossing franchise

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Was browsing when I stumbled onto a TIL (Today I learned) that I thought E4 could appreciate: https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/7a5tji/til_that_pokemon_is_the_highestgrossing_media/

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Interesting stuff. $55 billion total revenue through March 2017. More interesting stuff to be found at the source cited in the wiki.

www.pokemon.co.jp/corporate/en/data/

“Total shipments: over 23.6 billion cards worldwide as of the end of March 2017”. That is 656 million booster box equivalents. Wholesale value of that alone would be about $49 billion. Revenue would probably go by what they sell the product at to distributors though, not what wholesalers sell them to businesses at.

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Very interesting. 25% higher than 2nd Place Star Wars which debuted in 1977 as opposed to 1996 for Pokemon.

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Equivalent of 656m booster boxes, they must have saved a lot of dollars cutting down on the card stock quality with those types of numbers.

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It would be really interesting to see the growth over time as well. I’d be curious to see the actual impact of Pokemon Go and just how much growth in general occurred during specific events such as set releases.

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It’s over, Star Wars, we have the high ground.

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Not on the list: Godzilla, Dungeons and Dragons

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Dragon Ball and Spongebob also not in the listing. But that is probably because all these are property of a company and they only publish totals of revenue for the company. While pre-Disney Star Wars was all on his own and year numbers published reflected the actual revenue of the Star Wars brand, not the Disney brand incl. Star Wars.

But… it’s just a Wikipedia page, and that’s made by people, and people make mistakes.
The fact the last know numbers of SW are from 2015 totally don’t calculate in all revenue of Rogue One and the latest Lego SW stuff.

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Dragon Ball and Spongebob are on the Incomplete list. There were differences on how franchise were handle(Marvel Cinematic Universe is listed, but no comic books. Batman & Superman but nothing else of the DC universe.) My point being take this list with a grain of salt.