Fanta Stops Renting Horror Icons and Builds Its Own Monsters

Fanta has spent the better part of ten years borrowing other people's monsters. Beetlejuice in 2024. Chucky and M3gan last Halloween. Each tie-up worked — the numbers were enormous, ten billion impressions on the most recent one — and each one ended the moment the licence did.

On Monday the brand stopped renting and started building. 'Fanta's Haunted Universe', launched with a two-and-a-half-minute cinematic trailer, introduces four original creatures of the night: a jack-o'-lantern-headed scarecrow, a vampire who drives a sports car, a cyborg Frankenstein and a werewolf DJ. They spend the trailer fighting each other across a city for a magic elixir with, per the voiceover, the power to rule the living and the dead.

The strategic logic is less gothic than the execution. "What Christmas is to Coke is what we want Halloween to be for Fanta," said Ibrahim Khan, the brand's global vice-president of marketing — a comparison that tells you exactly how long a runway the company has drawn. Coke's Christmas equity was not built on a one-year licence; it was built on characters and iconography the company controls outright.

Khan is candid about what pushed the shift. Social listening showed audiences had started to anticipate the annual Fanta horror collaboration, which is flattering right up to the point where the brand becomes the supporting act in someone else's franchise. "How do we make sure this is not just one partnership to the next, to the next?" he said. Owning the IP answers the question permanently.

The three months ahead turn the trailer into inventory: character cans, collectable rewards, and live experiences extending the Haunted Fanta Factory the brand built last year to court horror fans directly. The full Halloween campaign lands on 26 August. The characters were developed with AI entertainment studio GRAiL — a production choice that will draw its own commentary in a category still nervous about synthetic craft.

What Fanta is really testing is whether a soft drink can behave like a studio. Khan says the possibilities run to content, features, theme-park experiences. That is either brand-platform ambition or a very expensive way to make four monsters, and the difference will only be visible in about three Halloweens' time.