Boys Birthday Party LegoBoys Bday Party IdeasLego Birthday Cake IdeasLegos PartyLego Cake IdeasBoys Birthday CakesLego PartiesLego CakesLego IdeasForwardThis Lego boy birthday party has a Lego man cake, popcorn bar and lots of great Lego ideas! There is only one country in the world where parents spend more on toys for each child than they do in the UK. The average British shopper spent £508 on toys and games for each child in 2013, the year that the Furby saw its sales grow by 66pc to become the bestselling toy. However, Australian consumers treated their children more, spending £555 per child in 2013, according to the most recent data available from Euromonitor International. Although the UK’s toy market is worth more than twice as much as Australia’s, at £5.7bn compared to £2.4bn, there are almost three times as many children in the UK under the age of 14. Euromonitor’s projections show that spend per child grew last year to £600 and £550 in Australia and the UK respectively, followed by Japan (£504), Germany (£497) and Hong Kong (£478).
North America, Western Europe and Australia have the highest middle class spending in the world. “Middle class households are very important to the toys and games industry because they largely drive consumer spending. Although the middle class in emerging markets is seeing rapid expansion, purchasing power remains low,” Euromonitor wrote in a report. “In 2013, middle class household spending on discretionary items (that is, all items except food, nonalcoholic drinks and housing) was $6,095 on average in China and $3,611 in India, compared to $83,959 in Australia and $72,994 in the US.” Countries with older first-time mothers and more women in the labour force – and therefore higher household income – also tend to spend more on toys and games for their children. The smash hit Disney film Frozen, which was released in the run up to Christmas 2013, gave a boon to the toy industry last year, as did The Lego Movie, which propelled the company ahead of Mattel to become the world’s largest toymaker.
The US-based National Retail Federation said that a fifth of all American parents would buy a doll of the Frozen characters Elsa or Anna last year, making the princesses more popular than Barbie. Ebay said it sold 12,623 Frozen products each day in the UK between July and January, or seven items per second, with more Frozen toys flying off shelves than Pokémon, Harry Potter, Toy Story and Thomas the Tank Engine merchandise. Demand for Frozen products took Disney to its strongest quarter in company history, while Lego boosted full-year profits by 16pc after selling 62m bricks, sets and minigifures in 2014. However, the surefire combination of Frozen Lego – Princess Elsa’ s Frozen Ice Castle – was not released in the UK until earlier this year. After three straight weekends at the top of the charts, The Lego Movie has finally been knocked off its brick pedestal by a pair of formidable box office forces: Liam Neeson and Jesus Christ. Despite middling reviews, Neeson’s cat-and-mouse thriller Non-Stop pulled in $10 million on Friday to take the No. 1 spot.
While this is a weaker opening than Neeson’s last action outing, 2012’s Taken 2, the film earned an A- CinemaScore from audiences, which should help push it to a better-than-expected $30 million take for the weekend and proves that Neeson’s appeal to fans of old-school action movies shows no sign of stopping. Not bad for a guy who’ll turn 62 this year. Adapted from the smash History Channel series The Bible, Son of God took in $9.4 million on Friday, which puts it on track for an estimated $26 to $28 million opening weekend. While this falls far short of the staggering $83.8 million opening for the last big-screen take on the life of Jesus Christ — Mel Gibson’s 2004 The Passion of the Christ — it demonstrates that the aggressive and savvy campaign by producers Mark Burnett and Roma Downey to market the film directly to devout Christians proved successful. What’s not clear yet is how well the film’s performance will hold up over time and whether its appeal will extend beyond the churchgoing community.
Though audiences gave Son of God an A- CinemaScore, reviews have been fairly dismal and, for better or worse, it hasn’t generated any of the headline-grabbing attention that helped fuel the Passion phenomenon. Despite being pushed out of the top spot, everything is still pretty awesome for The Lego Movie. The animated hit is continuing to perform strongly and will pass $200 million at the domestic box office this weekend. 1. Non-Stop: $10 million 2. Son of God: $9.4 million 3. The Lego Movie: $4.4 million 4. The Monuments Men: $1.4 million 5. 3 Days to Kill: $1.4 million Check back tomorrow for the full weekend box office report. More LEGO fun | Little innovation from previous games Written by Erik Johnsen on February 27, 2014 in Xbox 360 [Erik Johnsen, LEGO, LEGO Movie, TMG, TT Games] Brick building and brick smashing is back in all its glory with The Lego Movie Videogame. Like the LEGO games before, you’re in the world of plastic bricks re-enacting the story from a movie.
Only this time, it’s actually a movie about LEGO characters. You will find a robust collection of just over 90 characters to unlock and use in this game. The LEGO games formula has worked so well that TT Games is not slowing down anytime soon it would appear. Putting you into the story of Emmet, a basic construction worker who wakes up every day and lives out the very definition of “routine.” Emmet’s world is a well organized machine of efficiency governed by the benevolent President Business. But, as you’ll see from the prologue, he might not be so benevolent after all. Your mission will be, of course, to save the world. The basic mechanics of The LEGO Movie Videogame remain unchanged from previous LEGO stories: you move throughout the area and smash bricks to collect studs or pieces that help you move on to the next area. Certain obstacles require you to choose the correct character needed to move forward. The female characters like Wyldstyle have greater jumping ability, going much higher and bouncing between marked walls for a fun parkour feeling.
Emmet can fix anything and is needed to complete special builds that move you forward to the next checkpoint, or finish the chapter. Later on, various other characters with special objects or abilities will join in to add to the mayhem. Since the game is built around a single movie, it’s broken down into 15 chapters, and spans across a number of various LEGO worlds for you to experience. It gives you the sense of what it would be like to own and build massive cities and worlds with LEGO toys, if you had the space and the money to do so. The LEGO Movie Videogame is a bargain too. Appearances by characters from many of the previous LEGO games make for a fun reunion, and hopefully gives a bit of a glimpse of possible cameos in the future. Maybe some Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, anyone? TT Games’ biggest challenge is probably trying to get their LEGO themed titles to feel fresh. You can get to feeling kind of LEGO’d out when you finish one of these games, so they do a good job of putting as much humor as they possibly can into their games to take away some of the overexposure.