Jollibee is activating a full-stack entertainment partnership with DreamWorks Animation ahead of the studio's original film Forgotten Island, which opens in theaters September 25, 2026. The campaign launches September 14 at all Jollibee North America locations and runs through October 31 — giving the Filipino QSR brand a seven-week window to convert film traffic into dining occasions and Rewards member enrollment.
For operators watching how challenger QSR brands compete for share of stomach against McDonald's and Chick-fil-A, the structure of this campaign is worth studying. Rather than a single LTO item, Jollibee has built three distinct meal bundles — a 2-piece Chickenjoy Box Meal, a Chicken Sandwich Box Meal, and a 6-piece Bucket Bundle — each bundled with a blind-box collectible bracelet charm. The blind-box mechanic, borrowed from the toy and streetwear world, is a direct play on scarcity and repeat-visit behavior: eight standard charms plus a rare "Golden Bucket" variant create a reason to return.
The Activation Stack
The campaign runs on multiple channels simultaneously. In-store, three marquee locations in Manhattan, Torrance (CA), and Daly City (CA) will receive full Forgotten Island immersive takeovers — a costly but high-earned-media tactic that generates social content without a paid media budget attached. Online, a co-branded apparel line priced from $35 to $75 extends the brand into lifestyle retail, with the windbreaker exclusively available through Complex Shop — a deliberate move into streetwear culture that maps to the film's '90s aesthetic and skews toward a younger, digitally-native consumer.
The loyalty play is equally deliberate. Sweepstakes entry is gated behind Jollibee Rewards membership, meaning every campaign touchpoint — meal purchase, merch browsing, sweepstakes entry — is designed to push consumers into a trackable CRM relationship. The grand prize, a trip for two to Palawan Island in the Philippines, anchors the campaign's cultural narrative while generating aspirational social content the brand doesn't have to produce itself.
What Operators Should Watch
Film-QSR co-marketing isn't new, but the Forgotten Island deal is structured around cultural specificity rather than mass-market IP — and that distinction matters. The film features a predominantly Filipino cast including H.E.R., Liza Soberano, Lea Salonga, and Jo Koy, and Jollibee's introduction of a Calamansi Lemonade LTO directly ties Filipino culinary identity to the theatrical moment. That kind of cultural alignment reduces the risk of a partnership feeling transactional and gives the brand a defensible earned-media narrative that generic IP deals rarely produce.
For foodservice operators and brand marketers, the broader intelligence here is about how entertainment partnerships are evolving post-pandemic: the most effective activations now stack in-store theatre, collectible mechanics, loyalty data capture, and lifestyle merchandise into a single campaign architecture. Executing all four simultaneously requires cross-functional coordination across culinary, merchandising, digital, and retail channels — the kind of orchestration that brand launch planning and growth marketing teams increasingly need to embed before a campaign goes live, not after.
Jollibee operates more than 1,800 stores across 16 countries and holds the No. 1 QSR position in the Philippines, Vietnam, and Brunei. Its North America expansion makes entertainment-led traffic campaigns a logical lever — especially in markets where brand awareness is still building and a DreamWorks theatrical release delivers a concentrated attention spike operators can activate against.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
