McDonald's is sitting on a Marvel-sized vault of IP

A quick note before this week's issue: I'm short on time, so I'm reaching back into the archive. I first wrote the piece below about three years ago, after procrastination led me down a rabbit hole in the McDonald's Fandom Wiki. (Focus, time management, things of this nature… it’s a constant battle.)

A lot of you have subscribed since then, so it's new to most of the list, and it's aged better than I had any right to expect.

When I wrote it, my argument was that McDonald's was sitting on a Marvel-sized vault of IP it had barely started to mine. Since then, the company has gone all-in: a WcDonald's anime campaign (featuring its McDonaldland characters); a massive promotion centered around A Minecraft Movie (Grimace got rendered in Minecraft blocks); a full McDonaldland revival last summer that brought Hamburglar, Grimace, and Mayor McCheese back to the spotlight; and a Monopoly relaunch built around those same characters.

I closed the original post by saying I wouldn't bet against CosMc's. Reader, CosMc's is dead. But its refreshers do live on in McDonald’s new drink line. So I was directionally right and specifically wrong — which feels about right for this newsletter.

Enjoy the repost.

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My newest obsession began at an unexpected place: a search for the correct spelling of “Hamburglar.” (It’s “-ar,” not “-er.”)

I needed this information because I wanted to make a joke in the newsletter about the Hamburglar facing criminal racketeering charges. This led me on a journey deep into the McDonald’s Wiki – a magical, strange corner of the Internet.

The McDonald’s Wiki is hosted on the website Fandom, which allows anyone to create or edit pages of content that’s tied to their favorite intellectual property. The site’s rules for what makes something “notable” seem to be a bit more lax than Wikipedia: the Harry Potter Wiki, for instance, features lengthy entries for characters who are mentioned once in the book series.

The McDonald’s Wiki contains over 1,000 pages. (The Bible’s, by the way, has 750.) Here, you can read everything you’d ever want to know about McDonaldland characters like Birdie, Ronald, and Grimace – who, we learn, was once Ronald’s sworn enemy, due to his kleptomaniacal urge to steal soft drinks.

McDonald’s Lore tells us that Ronald permanently gained an upper hand over Grimace by giving him a flyer which stated that Grimace had been entered into a contest (?), only to later dunk the purple beast in Filet-O-Fish Lake while pretending to take his picture (??). Cowed into submission, Grimace swore allegiance to Ronald, and, the Wiki goes on to say, “The friendship between both Ronald & Grimace remain very important in the clown's history [sic].”

One wonders though if Grimace is just biding his time, waiting for the right opportunity to seek his revenge – perhaps on the forbidding shores of Filet-O-Fish Lake.

This is just one of many stories that have now taken away several hours of my life. I’m not alone: Some of the Wiki’s pages feature dozens of comments – real people speculating if Birdie is offended by McDonalds’ decision to serve McNuggets; other presumably real people responding that Mayor McCheese faces a more brutal dilemma, as his head is a cheeseburger.

The content isn’t limited to the comings and goings of the inhabitants of Mcdonaldland. Every menu item in McDonald’s history — from the McLobster Roll (a seasonal dish until-recently available in the Atlantic Canada and New England markets and priced, incredibly, at $7.99), to the McSpaghetti (which was discontinued in 1980 – except in the Philippines and Orlando, Florida, where it’s still served today) — has its own entry.

The pages on menu items suffer a bit from both a lack of editorial oversight and the Mandela Effect – the psychological phenomenon when masses of people collectively misremember something. One entry is dedicated to the “Bucket of Fries,” a discontinued menu item “big enough for five people to enjoy.” I was unable to corroborate if this actually existed, much less whether it was discontinued after a “group of 4 teenagers were hospitalized for sodium overdose,” although a bunch of people on Reddit seem to remember it.

Even corporate staff are included in the Wiki’s fun – interestingly, former CEO Don Thompson boasts a long entry, but slightly more controversial CEO Steve Easterbrook gets just one line.

McDonald’s has been culturally ubiquitous for so long that the deeper you dive into the Wiki, the more disorienting the experience becomes:

• Did you know Donald Trump once costarred in a commercial with Grimace?

• That the 1988 E.T.-ripoff Mac and Me is essentially a feature-length McDonald’s commercial, and that it includes a 5-minute dance sequence inside a McDonald’s?

• That a floating McDonald’s was once constructed in Vancouver, British Columbia on a 187-foot-barge? That it was officially named the Friendship 500? And unofficially, the McBarge?

What can we take away from all this? For one, I may need psychiatric help. And two, that McDonalds’ Lore is an underappreciated advantage for the company.

McDonald’s has many obvious strengths: Its unparalleled real estate portfolio, iconic menu items, globally known Golden Arches. But it’s also sitting on a treasure trove of IP – a Marvel-esque amount of pop-culture content that it can harvest for years.

Recently, the company has really been tapping into this goldmine:

• In October 2022, McDonald’s collaborated with the streetwear brand Cactus Plant Flea Market to introduce a line of Adult Happy Meals. Combining childhood nostalgia with a sought-after fashion house turned out to be marketing catnip: the meals sold out in a matter of weeks; toys were later sold for hundreds of dollars on eBay.

• In June 2023, McDonald’s launched a promotion to celebrate Grimace’s birthday, featuring a meal of either McNuggets or a Big Mac, fries, and the “berry”-flavored Grimace Shake. After it inspired an absurdist viral video trend, it became one of the most successful marketing campaigns in fast-food history. When CEO Chris Kempczinski reported McDonald’s stellar Q2 results, he said, “If I’m being honest, the theme was Grimace.”

• On that same earnings call, Kempczinski teased a smaller-format restaurant design McDonald’s will begin testing in early 2024 named “CosMcs.” CosMc was a googly-eyed alien character who appeared in McDonald’s TV commercials in the late-80s and early-90s. Details on the new concept are scarce — as are people who actually remember CosMc. But at this point, I wouldn’t bet against its success.

So where does McDonald’s go from here? Here’s one possible direction: why not tap into the recent success of Barbie and Super Mario Bros and get these Mcdonaldland characters on the big screen?

Imagine: a gritty, Michael Mann-directed heist flick. We follow our masked anti-hero from behind as he breaks into a secure military installation. We watch him hop a fence, cut the security camera lines and crack into a vault – filled to the brim with Big Macs. Coming this fall: Hamburglar.