Sources vary from all over the web, and mainstream media articles often have different figures when they are close together in time.  Official sales data is not updated all the time.  Still, the $30 billion franchise value is heading up now because of the 3D launch of ”Star Wars: The Phantom Menace” as the (probable) first but not last of the Star Wars remakes coming in 3D.

The relaunch of the movie franchise in 3D is likely to boost the franchise’s value much more when you count ticket sales, and then tally up merchandise sales, new media sales, product sales and more.  Box Office Mojo noted that The Phantom Menace in 3D is going to appear in 2,655 theaters.  Throw in the intellectual property values and future sales, and the value will head far north of $30 billion. 

It was just in 2007 that Forbes noted, “Star Wars’initial release was followed by another five blockbuster films and a mini-industry of tapes and DVDs, toys, video games and books. Taken together over its 30 years of cultural dominance, the Star Wars franchise has earned more than $22 billion.”   Another figure in late 2011 put the total Star Wars franchise value at a whopping $27 billion from Statistic Brain (using Forbes and Lucasfilm data).  We also have gathered more recent data than those prior calculations.

Star Wars creator George Lucas is now a multi-billionaire.  The Forbes wealthiest 400 list puts Lucas at a net worth of $3.2 billion in its September 2011 report and that is lower than the $3.6 billion in a prior report.

Read Also: The Most Valuable Film Franchises of All-Time

Another 2007 figure used by Forbes was a monstrous $9 billion in toys with another $1.6 billion at the time having been generated by Star Wars video games.  More toys have sold since then, and more video game sales have been seen.

Brand new data from Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ: ERTS) shows over 2 million MMORPG have sold of ‘Star Wars: The Old Republic’through the end of January with some 1.7 million online users.  Taking just half of the users with a two-month average life of subscriber dollars comes to $180 million in total revenues between sales and subscriptions in just the first quarter of 2012.  Then there will be the tail revenue stream from loyalists and those in the next upgrade coming soon, generating millions of dollars more each month. If the success remains, a business mind would easily predict another MMORPG sale in the future.

Lucas Licensing of Lucasfilms has noted over $20 billion in consumer sales worldwide.  This includes Hasbro, Inc. (NASDAQ: HAS) and Kenner toys, merchandise sold, over 100 million books sold (with over 80 New York Times best sellers), museum exhibitions, apparel, consumer electronics, housewares, and the endless lines of other products.  The $20 billion figure has been used for quite some time as well by Lucasfilm on its site.  Imagine the sales that will soon be counted if you just looked at the major retail store websites: Toys R Us had 603 items; WalMart had 539 items; and Target had 800 items.

The Total Value of Star Wars Today…

• $4.27 Billion in worldwide box office sales (See full chart below), not adjusted for ticket price hikes in today’s dollars
• $20 billion in Licensing sales (toys, books, apparel, consumer products, and on)
• $3 billion in video games (over 100 million units sold)
• $2.5 billion, and climbing, in DVD sales
• $800 million (or more) and climbing in movie rentals (going from DVD back to VHS and even Betamax)

THE GRAND TOTAL… $30.57 BILLION, and growing…

Forget about the $30.5 billion in total sales so far.  That assumes that all sales suddenly stop in the next few weeks. We will not count the $3.2 billion in net worth of George Lucas because that is a personal net worth even if there is overlap in some of the areas we would cover.

Here are the analyst initiations we have seen so far from the underwriting firms this Wednesday:

• Started as Overweight with $11 price target at Barclays;
• Started as Neutral with $10.50 price target at Bank of America Merrill Lynch;
• Started as Buy with $13 price target at Goldman Sachs;
• Started as Overweight with $12 target at JPMorgan;
• Started as Overweight with $11 price target at Piper Jaffray.

After we added up these five (not counting the few non-underwriting analyst calls out there) we get a consensus price target objective of about $11.50 for Zynga.

JON C. OGG

Recently public gamemaker Zynga Inc. (NASDAQ: ZNGA) could reap the benefits of more interest in games, especially casino games, on Facebook. IGT is paying about $100 for each of Double Down’s approximately 5 million players. Zynga claims 30 million players for its online poker game. That’s about half Znyga’s current market cap.

IGT’s shares are down about -2% at noon today at $17.40, in a 52-week range of $13.38-$;19.15. Znyga’s shares are up about 2% at $8.62, in a range of $7.97-$11.50. Zynga’s shares went public at $10, so the company still qualifies as a busted IPO.

Paul Ausick

The NPD figures can be read in two ways, and neither is good for the industry. The first is that as gamers move to smartphones they pay less for games. It is a sort of “creative destruction” as one business model gives way to another. In the meantime, revenue across the entire industry falls, which means from a sales standpoint it is a secular retreat.

The more ominous theory about the drop in game sales is that consumers felt pinched during the holidays — more than some retail figures indicated. However, when the government released December retail sales, the information showed an increase of only 0.1% to $400.6 billion. Consumer spending shows that the caution that marked the early part of the year never really disappeared.

A game console costs about $250. A game retails for $50 or so. These prices are within the reach of many American consumers. A game console is a gift that keeps on giving, game after video game. Yet, fewer people were giving them, by far, than they were a year ago.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Normally we would not care about listing the “Class A” shares, but Zynga has a complicated share structure with Class A, as well as Class B and Class C shares.  The filing notes:

• Each share of Class A common stock will be entitled to one vote per share. Each share of Class B common stock will be entitled to seven votes per share. Each share of Class C common stock will be entitled to 70 votes per share. Each share of the Class B common stock and Class C common stock will be convertible at any time into one share of Class A common stock.

The Class B shares will represent approximately 72.5% of the voting power and the Class C shares will represent approximately 25.7% of the voting power.  Tally this up and it looks as though the Class A shares, which the IPO investors are getting, will have a whopping 1.8% of the voting power.  Zynga is selling a whopping $1 billion worth of stock and the cumulative sum by the buyers is less than 2%.  Maybe Zynga should consider trying to just avoid holding shareholder meetings in the future because the public buyers have no power at all.

Mark Pincus, founder and Chief Executive Officer, holds shares of the Class B common stock and all of the shares of Class C common stock.  He will control approximately 36.2% of the total voting power of our outstanding capital stock after the IPO.

The book-runners are Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs.  Co-managers are listed as Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Barclays Capital, J.P. Morgan, and Allen & Company.

What is funny about our own skepticism and caution is that it may be displaced for the near-term.  Despite our concerns of the voting power limits this IPO could have priced higher.  It is also being touted by many as already being at a premium when shares debut in Friday trading.  Still, Stern Agee labeled it with an “Underperform” rating ahead of the IPO as it is not in the underwriting group.

Here is the full ninth amended S-1 filing that shows the full ownership structure, financials, competitors, and more.

JON C. OGG

The James Bond franchise has more than 20 movies already and is getting a new film in 2012.  Then there is the extremely successful Twilight series, which grossed about $1.8 billion in sales in its first three films alone. The two-part Breaking Dawn installments, to be released in November 2011 and in November 2012, will push the franchise’s value even higher and it could easily move into the top ten. Similarly, the three Ice Age films have grossed about $1.92 billion. The fourth installment, coming in July 2012, could make it another worthy contender for the top-grossing franchises.

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, the fourth in the MI franchise, will hit theaters in December 2011. So far, the three previous movies have grossed about $1.4 billion. Men in Black and Ghostbusters were large film franchises and each has a third film coming in 2012, although neither seems likely to be a serious challenger to the top ten of all-time.

Star Trek’s franchise is so far eleven films, with $1.3 billion in box office sales, is currently far from contention as a top ten movie franchise. The success of the “reboot,” along with a new sequel in the summer of 2012, could propel the franchise up in the ranking if they keep making new films. Similarly, the Iron Man series, which grossed so far $1.2 billion with the first two films, could be propelled much higher with the upcoming Avengers and Iron Man films. James Cameron’s Titanic from 1997 has grossed $1.843 billion in global ticket sales, but the film is about to get new life with a 3-D release in 2012 even if most viewers know the fate of the ship and the characters.

Some blockbuster movie franchises like The Matrix, Jurassic Park, Toy Story, Indiana Jones, X-Men, and a dozen or so others are currently just honorable mentions.  The current threshold to be a top-ten movie franchise is effectively about $2.5 billion in global box office ticket sales. That does not even count DVD sales, rental fees, comics, books, toys, memorabilia, and other movie merchandise. The coming waves of new sequels and prequels will raise that threshold much higher. Almost all sales data came from Box Office Mojo and some international sales data on older films came from IMDB.

Here are 24/7 Wall St.’s top ten movie franchises of all-time:

Competition from other console makers like Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) and Nintendo Corp. (OTC: NTDOY) and a huge hacking scandal have combined to weigh on Sony’s sales of the Playstation. This could be more bad news for game designers like Activision Blizzard Inc. (NASDAQ: ATVI) and Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. (NASDAQ: TTWO), both of which have seen customers move from packaged software to downloadable games. Game makers are selling more downloadable games, but revenue is lower than for packaged games although margins are higher.

The real culprits are smartphones from Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL), Nokia Corp. (NYSE: NOK), Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. (NYSE: MMI) soon to be a division of Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG), Samsung Electronics (OTC: SSNLF), and HTC Corp. We noted the continuing shift to smartphone games in our review of earnings from Activision’s earnings earlier this month.

Nintendo has already dropped the price of its 3DS handheld console from $249.99 to $169.99 in an effort to attract more buyers. After one week of sales in Japan, Nintendo’s efforts appear to have paid off with sales jumping to more than 214,000 from just over 32,000 in the week before the price cut.

Nintendo’s latest earnings were down by about 50% from the previous quarter and the company has lowered its sales target for its Wii console and lowered its profit target by more than 80%.

Sony would like to avoid that, but the debacle over the hacking attack and the lack of enthusiasm for the Playstation 3 from the beginning are going to be too much to overcome.

Combined with the continuing incursion from the smartphone makers, Sony may have waited too long to get on the latest train to leave the station. Sort of reminds us of how the company and its Walkman were blindsided by MP3 players. This won’t be the last price drop for the Playstation 3.

Paul Ausick

The one issue we have is that there is still going to be a very complicated share class structure with A, B, and C shares in the company.  This implies that we have yet another IPO that will have a limited float and likely carry an artificially high market capitalization solely because of a small float.

The underwriting group is huge: Morgan Stanley; Goldman Sachs; Merrill Lynch; Barclays Capital; J.P. Morgan Securities; and Allen & Company.  Zynga’s stats are amazing when you consider that there is no true value other than the entertainment value (not to knock entertainment value, of course).  Zynga has customers in 166 nations, 60 million daily active users, 232 million monthly active users, 2 billion minutes of game play each day, and 4 billion “in-game user-to-user connections.

For the three months ended March 31, 2010 and 2011:

• revenue rose from $100.9 million to $242.9 million;
• bookings rose from $178.3 million to $286.6 million;
• net income rose from $6.4 million to $16.8 million;
• adjusted EBITDA rose from $93.6 million to $112.3 million.

From 2008 to 2010:

• revenue rose from $19.4 million to $597.5 million;
• bookings rose from $35.9 million to $838.9 million;
• net loss of -$22.1 million to net income of $90.6 million;
• adjusted EBITDA rose from $4.5 million to $392.7 million.

There is a warning in here on how many customers are free users that pay the company nothing:

• “Consistent with our “free-to-play” business model, historically less than 5% of our players have been paying players. Because the opportunity for social interactions increases as the number of players increases, we believe that maintaining and growing our overall number of players, including the number of players who may not purchase virtual goods, is important to the success of our business. As a result, we believe that the number of players who choose to purchase virtual goods will continue to constitute a small percentage of our overall players as our business grows.”

The risk section is also full of caveats that you might not see elsewhere in other online businesses.  The first and foremost risk is FACEBOOK: “if we are unable to maintain a good relationship with Facebook, our business will suffer.” Other business risks are as follows:

• “we operate in a new and rapidly changing industry, which makes it difficult to evaluate our business and prospects.”
• “we have a new business model and a short operating history, which makes it difficult to evaluate our prospects and future financial results and may increase the risk that we will not be successful.”
• “we rely on a small percentage of our players for nearly all of our revenue.”
• “a small number of games have generated a majority of our revenue, and we must continue to launch and enhance games that attract and retain a significant number of paying players in order to grow our revenue and sustain our competitive position.”
• “a significant majority of our game traffic is hosted by a single vendor, and any failure or significant interruption in our network could impact our operations and harm our business.”
• “security breaches, computer viruses and computer hacking attacks could harm our business and results of operations.”
• “if we fail to effectively manage our growth, our business and operating results could be harmed.”
• “our growth prospects will suffer if we are unable to develop successful games for mobile platforms.”
• “expansion into international markets is important for our growth, and as we expand internationally, we face additional business, political, regulatory, operational, financial and economic risks, any of which could increase our costs and hinder such growth.”
• “the three class structure of our common stock has the effect of concentrating voting control with those stockholders who held our stock prior to this offering, including our founder and Chief Executive Officer and our other executive officers, employees and directors and their affiliates; this will limit your ability to influence corporate matters.”

So here is the deal in a nutshell: Zynga is a massive growth company.  You will be getting a sliver of the company and will never have any real voice as a shareholder no matter what. The company is almost entirely Facebook-dependent.

JON C. OGG

There are several reasons for Apple’s stock stellar growth. The first is that its sales and profits continue to grow at double- and sometime triple-digit rates. This is absolutely unprecedented for such a large company. Furthermore, Apple has been able to introduce new products and gain wide adoption for them in a way that is unmatched by any other company in the world.

24/7 Wall St. examined in detail why Apple has been able to reach a market value that should — if most analysts are correct — move above $400 billion this year. These are “The Ten Reasons Apple Is The Most Valuable Company In The World”

Game makers have finally gotten the message that packaged software sales are not likely to recover in the face of competition from digital sales. Activision reported second-quarter earnings yesterday, and adjusted EPS rose to $0.10, double the expected $0.05. Revenue also came in higher that the expected $602 million, at $699 million. Digital sales accounted for 60% of Activision’s revenue in the quarter.

Activision also raised its revenue guidance for 2011 from $4.05 billion to $4.18 billion and forecast an EPS boost from $0.61 to $0.68.

None of the traditional video game-makers is about to give up on packaged retail sales. The industry currently garners about 75% of its revenue from packaged sales, although some industry leaders expect that to drop to just 50% within the next five years.

For some game-makers that will mean a change in revenue mix, but a change in total revenues because digitally-distributed games generally don’t cost as much though margins are usually better. Revenue growth could be a problem unless game companies can figure out ways to get buyers to spend more on tokens and add-ons for the games they play.

Another thing that may have to change is the $40 price for a packaged game. That is considered by many gamers to be too high. If the game-makers are forced to drop their prices for packaged games and are, at the same time, seeing total revenues fall, they could find it difficult to convince investors of their value.

The other major shift is away from hand-held devices like Nintendo’s DS and 3DS and toward smartphones from Apple or companies using the Android operating system from Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG). Even the pre-teen market, the largest for hand-helds, is perfectly happy to play games on an iPhone or other smartphone.

Nintendo and Sony have not fared nearly as well as Microsoft in the console/game market, primarily because Microsoft beat them to the punch with digital downloads and online gaming from the Xbox and Xbox Live. Nintendo expects to expand its digital offerings over the next three years. The company has already dropped the price of its 3DS in an effort to boost sales. It’s trying to avoid the same mistake that Sony made with its introduction of the PlayStation 3, when the $600 console kept buyers away in droves.

Avoiding past mistakes and adjusting to new distribution and revenue models is not going to be easy for game-makers. One thing that may make it easy to adapt is consolidation in the industry. That may be on the horizon sooner rather than later.

Paul Ausick