In the real-life Times Square, Samsung had spent truckloads of cash for
that top-shelf ad space; its blue oval logo was in the second-to-highest spot.
Columbia Pictures, the studio behind Spider-Man and owned by Sony, was
clearly playing foul.
Samsung’s legal team prepared to join a lawsuit whose plaintiffs
included NBC—which, as a Sony Pictures competitor, had also had its logo
snipped out—and property owners in Times Square who felt their rights
were violated.
But before going to court, Samsung executives convinced Sony to
reinstate the logo, using the leverage of being a parts supplier.
“At the end of the day, Sony needed Samsung for its components as
much as Samsung needed Sony,” a lawyer familiar with the case told me.
Samsung’s decision to settle was undoubtedly the right call. For the
other plaintiffs, the judge ruled in Sony’s favor on free-speech grounds.
Since Spider-Man was a fictional work of cinema, the film studio was free
to alter the real-life Times Square as it saw fit.
“They tried to remove us from Times Square. But Samsung is still
alive,” Chin Dae Je, president of the digital media division, bragged to the
audience at a Manhattan party.
Eric Kim became a hero within Samsung.—
IN 2002 WARNER BROS. approached Kim with an offer: It was planning a
sequel to the iconic film The Matrix, and the filmmakers needed someone
who could design the green-and-black futuristic handsets for protagonists
Neo, Trinity, and Morpheus.
On the surface, The Matrix Reloaded looked like an extraordinary
product placement opportunity. The sci-fi franchise had incredible pop-
culture appeal and a fanatical following. Nokia had broken through with a
product placement of its own in The Matrix, released in 1999. The Finnish
company designed a sleek, minimalist phone for the movie’s main
character, Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, who receives a surprise call from
Morpheus warning him that Agent Smith and his goons were searching for
him in his office. The Nokia phone was a hit. To this day, Matrix fans buy
and sell Nokia’s imitations of the phone on eBay.
During the 2002 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Kim and his