[Black Arbor]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Pravus Prime

It's the venders, not Hasbro that's playing a big role. The stores were quite verbal in not wanting Avengers merchandise to the point there were articles in newspapers about it at the time.






Spiderman 3 happened. The movie didn't do well, wasn't received well, and the toy line was a multi-million dollar loss all around. Then after Green Lantern bombed in every way possible, superhero movie toys practically became radioactive in the minds of most venders and their purchasers, which partly fed into the lack of merchandise even to this day.

They don't want to take the chance that they'll have pegs of unsaleable product on a loss leader when shelf space is so vital. So when you've got a string of proven failures, it makes them very unwilling to risk the order again in the future and those purchasers are reported to have very long memories.

Remember, Hasbro doesn't make their product for us to buy, they sell it to stores, the stores determine what we get, which we help prove them right or not by buying. Heck, until not that long ago it was illegal for any company like Hasbro to sell direct to the customer, so both the consumer and the creator was dependent on the purchaser to even get the product made. The market is changing and we have a lot more options and our voice is far better heard, but it's still not that far removed from how it was done for the last few decades just due to the quantity of sales the market 6 (or 12) do.

So these few and far between movie figures are probably the best they can do. Do you really think Hasbro just doesn't want to make all the Avengers from a mega-blockbuster movie and sell them all to you?

I think the problem with the Spider-Man 3 toy selection was the fact that the first two films toylines cemented the 6 inch scale, then they made a switch to five inches for the third and they lost a lot of revenue from people who wanted to add new versions of Kraven, Rhino, Mysterio, Blck cat, etc... to their collections. They tried to do damage control later with that Sandman BAF series but since half the figures were straight re-releases of figures people probably already had, mixed with sub-par sculpts and wonky articulation for the new figures, they really shot themselves in the foot :P