Fanta has launched Haunted Universe, an original entertainment world built for Halloween, with a cinematic trailer released on 24 August 2026 ahead of the full campaign going live on 26 August.
The first chapter introduces four original characters, described by the brand as reimaginings of enduring horror and Halloween archetypes through a Fanta lens. Each has been given its own identity, personality, backstory, supernatural abilities and role in the wider world. They have been reported as Haystacks, Drayk, Howlie and Franx.
The strategic shift is stated plainly by the company. After two years of collaborating with established horror properties, Fanta is moving from collaborator to creator by building characters and stories it owns.
Ibrahim Khan, global vice president of marketing at Fanta, said the brand is “dead serious about Halloween”, and has described the ambition as a platform intended to entertain fans for many years rather than a single season.
More character stories, content, experiences and surprises are planned through the season as the world unfolds.
The licensing history it is moving away from
The context matters more than the trailer.
In 2024, Fanta ran a Beetlejuice-themed line-up licensed from Warner Bros. In 2025, it worked with Universal Pictures and Blumhouse on limited-edition flavours featuring horror icons including Chucky, M3GAN, Freddy Fazbear and The Grabber, with Michael Myers added in the U.S. line-up.
Each of those seasons bought attention. None of them left Fanta owning anything afterwards.
The hybrid it actually launched
Fanta has not made a clean break from licensing.
The brand has announced Ghost Face, the masked killer from the Scream films, as the first horror icon to enter Haunted Universe. Khan framed the collaboration as welcoming an icon into a world Fanta is building for fans to return to year after year.
Reporting on the Great Britain line-up indicates Ghost Face sits on Fanta Orange and Orange Zero Sugar, with the four owned characters taking the other flavours. That detail is the most revealing part of the launch.
The Engage Positive view
This is the correct move made in the correct order, and the packaging allocation proves the brand understands its own risk.
Licensed IP is rented attention. It works immediately because the audience already knows Chucky, and it stops working the day the contract ends. You pay a royalty, you get a spike, you own nothing. Two seasons of that is a reasonable education. A third would have been a habit.
Owned IP inverts the economics. It costs more upfront and delivers less in year one, because nobody has heard of Haystacks or Howlie. But every subsequent season compounds against an asset that carries no royalty and no renewal risk, and the brand controls what the characters do.
The trade is not free. Owning IP does not eliminate risk, it converts royalty risk into relevance risk, and relevance risk never shows up on an invoice. A licensed monster is guaranteed to be recognised. An original one has to earn it, and there is no refund if it does not.
Which is exactly why the Ghost Face allocation is smart rather than cowardly. Putting the licensed icon on the highest-volume flavour and the unproven originals on the rest means the commercial line is protected by borrowed recognition while the owned characters get real shelf exposure and a full season of story to build on. It is a hedge, and it is the right one.
The open question is funding. A seasonal campaign is an expense line approved annually. A multiyear entertainment property is closer to a capital item, judged across years, which is a materially different conversation with a finance director. Brand platforms usually die in that conversation rather than in the market.
For marketers without Coca-Cola’s budget, the transferable principle is smaller than it looks. Every borrowed asset you use, a licence, a celebrity, a trending sound, an influencer’s audience, is rented. Ask what your brand still owns the day the rental ends. If the answer is nothing, you are buying attention rather than building an asset.
What to watch
Whether the four original characters return in 2027 with developed storylines is the only real test. Year one of an owned universe proves nothing.
Whether Fanta invites further pop culture IP into the universe, and on what terms, will show whether Haunted Universe is a home for the brand’s own characters or a more elegant licensing wrapper.
And whether the owned characters ever graduate onto the orange can will indicate genuine confidence in the asset rather than a hedge maintained indefinitely.
