Should Hasbro have a new Marvel line.
 

After seeing The Wolverine last night I went trawling the net as there were a couple of characters I'd like to add to my collection.
As you probably know The Wolverine figures are poor as were the Iron Man 3 figure (once again cool characters done poorly).
Maybe instead of doing a separate line for every movie they should just start a new line called Marvel Movieverse.
Before you say it would stop us getting some of the background characters. How often do we get them anyway?
You never know we might end up with some this way. Plus Hasbro would be able to reuse some older figures for re-releases.

Wave 1 for me would be.

Iron Man Mark 42.
Iron Patriot.
Tony Stark.
Wolverine.
Yukio.
Silver Samurai.

It'd have to be better than what we're getting.

i dont think they would do that for the films marvel/disney doesn't have direct control over. wolverine/xmen would most likely have their own line though.

Good point. I'd not thought of that. I don't know what it's like overseas but in the UK we sometimes don't get waves till they hit discount stores and end up with tonnes of wave 1 clogging up pegs forever.

That happens in the US too. It's usually because the retailers order too much of the initial waves and wait for all that to sell through before re-ordering. So the latter waves either don't show up at all, or eventually show up at deep discount stores (if we're lucky).

Even if Hasbro did make a separate movie-verse line for just the Marvel/Disney films, it's no guarantee that the figures won't be just as crappy as the IM3 and Wolverine toys.

Yeah. It's what I'd do. I don't have share holders breathing down my neck though.

I was thinking last night, why not go back to the 90s, give us an Xmen line. Clearly it's a property, why don't we get some characters we haven't gotten. I don't care about kit bashes of whatever as long as I can get these characters guaranteed if you have is characters from the Jim Lee run people would love them and they would sell provided they're the right ones.

I also think Psylocke didn't sell because she was virtually unrecognizable. She looked nothing like she does in the books and her box art was terrible

I was under the impression that female figures don't sell well.

I don't think they do as a lot of times female characters aren't that action orientated. In the X-men line there are a lot more females who get stuck in. So maybe they might sell better.
I mean look at Yukio from The Wolverine she was bad a$$.

The problem is refreshing to get past the old waves. If they did new packaging about every 3-4 waves for the movies, we might start seeing the figures at the end of the lines more.

I like the idea of a unified dedicated movie-verse line, but it might be better to do it with a package refresh per movie, or separate them by studios and have a package refresh per whatever big property is next.

Like for Spider-Man do Amazing Spider-man, then refresh with ultimate while the next sequel is prepping, then back to amazing for 2, then back to ultimate after. (Let's us get more diverse villians and heroes that way too.)

For Avengers, refresh to Thor for 2 waves, then cap for 2 waves, then guardians, then avengers 2, and repeat process. Any dead time inbetween run one off waves with Hulk and agents of smash or Avengers Assemble.

For X-Men, do the same. Except here I'd suggest an X-Men classics filler since there's no toon. So it'd be like 3 waves DOFP, then filler from the wolverine, X1-XFC, and an occasional filler from XMO:W, followed by whatever the next X sequel is.

Alongside this, I'd pair up MU to alternate brand refreshes and focuses every year too. I'd keep the articulation close to unified between them too. No more of this "The wolverine" or Mattel style 3.75 articulation. This way the figures can be tweaked or retooled to go back into the main MU headers at any time or in prep for future boxsets.

It'd also help narrow down the shelf space some to only 4 lines at a time instead of the confusion we have now. Though really, it'd be better if we could narrow it down to just 2 or 3 at a time.

Maybe they should just merge them all under one label like "Cinema Classics" then have the comic line be more diverse with the headers per team.

they should have 2 lines
comic line and movie line separate. The reason they are together from now on is because marvel are making more films so when a film comes out a wave comes out so you can have an unrelated character to the film but get away with it. i.e the ultron figure no reference to him in the film but gets a comic looks and bought because it has iron man 3 on the package. So 2 out of six are movie figures should be fine , sometimes.

I know that as a ML buyer, I'd buy them all, and not to toot the Hasbro horn, but they are making the figures better and better. What I mean by that is the figs are more easily crossing the line between comic and movie and are becoming more compatible.

Would Hasbro do it? I don't think so. I think they're cost cutting right now, but if popularity of the line grows in the next few years (wildly), then why not? The more the merrier. I hope this was on point

I think we might like a collectors oriented movie line. The Big H has no reason to. I know a lot of people like to blame retailers for distribution issues. The problem now is that we have proof that this is not the case. That proof is G.I. Joe.

Last year G.I.Joe is goign to hit theaters and they release wave one to retailers. The studio postpones release and the retailers are stuck with waves one and two. Eventually every store has one or two battle kata roadblocks warming the pegs.
Movie comes out they release wave three. It sells right away. So they immediately restock stores with...wave one figures. Now we already saw those figures go through the retailers and out to the discount stores. That means that Hasbro decided the best way to serve the custommers, the best way to promote a line that has been running in one style or another for more than 45 years was to ship the figures they know wont sell, get the money r=from the retailers and call it a day.
This was a Hasbro OWNED intellectual property. If you think they'll treat Marvel any better your just decieiving yourself.
Think about the construction costs. I know they were mattel but they were selling 5 of the lower articulation figures for $20 with a free $10 ticket to the movie. How much do you think they cost to make? $1? $2? Produce cheap figres, collect what you can and mine the next intellectual property dry. the fans really dont have anywhere else to go anyways right?