I really could see Hasbro giving up Marvel and Star Wars. They just don't sell that well anymore. Kids don't buy toys, and the adult collectors have lost a lot of interest in Star Wars and Marvel after all the lackluster films, shows, and comics.
And with what Disney charges for rights, sales being down, and the fact Hasbro wants to shift away from making physical toys and allow people to license out their original IP's, I can definitely see Hasbro bringing their relationship with Disney to an end.
That doesn't mean they will, but I wouldn't be surprised.
I also don't see Hasbro going after the DC license. If they are getting rid of IP's that aren't their own (like Star Wars and Marvel), why buy another IP that's not theirs if their future focus is to no longer make physical toys and just license out their own properties so that smaller companies can make toys of them.
I don't think Hasbro is getting rid of the Marvel or DC license, but it would be funny for them to double- and triple-down on their own IP. Especially because Hollywood/big business is so risk-averse right now. They have to keep monetizing Transformers, GI Joe, D&D, etc. because no one is brave enough to create the next Transformers.
They were supposed to be building up to a big multimedia relaunch centered around a brand new show (done entirely by a Western production team without any recycled Japanese footage for once) for Netlix, but that fell apart earlier this year and seemingly killed any momentum Hasbro has left for the brand.
Right. Not the forum for it, but I was wondering if the director change Schizo mentioned is why the company just 180'd from plans to do a new show.
there was probably no real point in continuing to do Power Rangers toys without any sort of new media to bring in a mass audience.
I'm a Power Rangers fan so I'm going to apologize for momentarily derailing. This is yet another instance where my lack of any business or marketing degree causes me immense confusion and frustration:
Hasbro owns the license to Power Rangers outright. No dread fees to pay. The brand has a TV show that ran successfully for 30 consecutive years, that reinvented itself each year with brand new characters. Most of its characters are in uniform, so you can get away with doing the vast majority of the hero characters on just a couple of male and female bucks Marvel Legends-style. Money saved! "But there's no media tie-in, so sorry, fans, our hands are tied". Line canceled.
OK. You also own GI Joe outright. No dread fees to pay. Classified is probably the best mass-market domestic action figure line going today. Yes, there's reuse and repaints, but there is also tons of new parts going on. I'd say the perfect balance has been struck. There are Haslabs that fund in days, there are vehicles with $100 price tags that sell out. But there's no media tie-in. Where Power Rangers has ran for 30 consecutive years, the GI Joe TV heyday has been dead since the early 90s. Since then there have been three movie flops peppered in every so often, but other than that, no media to back up GI Joe.
If anything I'd say that GI Joe Classified is proof that a media tie-in is nice to have but not a be-all-end-all they'd like you to believe it is whenever they need a scapegoat for rocky sales. "Oh the movies and TV aren't doing so well right now". Yeah, but GI Joe has NO movies or TV. Toy line going strong.
So one Hasbro-owned brand say, "Forget the media tie-in" and forges ahead strong without it. The other Hasbro-owned brand say, "Oops, they dropped the show after 30 years, gotta cancel this line." I don't get it.
I do think something changes this time, but expect Hasbro to still be making Marvel figures....and just maybe Todd too.
I'm curious how Diamond Select and their 7" figures license works - and if that might keep McF from that scale with Marvel.
Which part of it? People have revealed multiple aspects of how it works in the various Fwoosh forums over the years. What I recall is that they're a sub-contractor of Hasbro who gets the 7" scale, and they have a maximum number of articulation points they can implement. Hasbro is aware of what's in their pipeline, but I've never heard whether or not Hasbro can reject their ideas.
If anyone knows other aspects of how the Diamond license works or have heard different ideas about the points above then please do share.
it would be funny for them to double- and triple-down on their own IP.
Why did they cede producing Power Rangers to other companies this year? I mean, I get that sales were poor, but why are other companies able do it better?
it would be funny for them to double- and triple-down on their own IP.
Why did they cede producing Power Rangers to other companies this year? I mean, I get that sales were poor, but why are other companies able do it better?
Collect money leasing their IPs to other companies, spend no money making the toys on their own is my only guess. I don't think Hasbro really cares if another company does it better or not.
He's a d-bag, but Haim Saban is also seemingly the only person on the planet that understands how to make Power Rangers profitable. It's a simple system: you license footage from Japan for the show, use non-union inexpensive actors and writers to westernize it, license out the media for everything, and sit back and take in the money. Both Disney and Hasbro tried to inject a lot of cash, and a lot of costs, into Power Rangers and failed. Hasbro more-so than Disney since they event went ahead and did the movie plus they took a lot of the merchandizing in-house. And with an expensive acquisition, you're starting in the red and need to recoup that cost. Hasbro probably only added to it and now seems to be stuck with a franchise they probably don't even want. Licensing out the brand is basically their only avenue to making any money off the franchise (in their mind) without adding more expense. If they have a long-term plan it's probably to wait a little while and then try for a reboot. Or they're just going to let it become a legacy franchise and hope that someone is always willing to pay for the MMPR license.
My understanding with Diamond is that they basically are grandfathered in as their license goes way back with Marvel. They're limited to scale, articulation, and number of releases in a fiscal year. The licensing fee increases must be capped or something to allow for it to keep going as long as it has, or they just don't change. The price of their figures, when adjusted for inflation, really hasn't changed and may have even gone down.
The biggest obstacle, in my opinion, to the deal continuing with Hasbro and Marvel is that Disney is really angling to up their licensing fees across the board. They view that as their brand, and in their mind, their brands only accumulate value. Where as Hasbro can probably point to diminishing sales with Marvel and Star Wars as evidence that the brands are not subject to a reduction in popularity. Plus, the way Disney operates has not worked well for Hasbro. I'm sure they would have loved to have a full wave of figures out there for Deadpool & Wolverine, but Disney probably withheld too much from the film to make that possible. Basically, if Hasbro is looking to lower the licensing fees then that will be a non-starter with Disney. They'll start courting others and we'll see what happens. I do think the suggested dropping of the full master license could be in play and would be a creative way to continue Legends, so long as no one else is willing to meet Disney's asking price for said master license. They would probably like the idea of being able to sub-license it out further while still getting a nice paycheck from Hasbro. Either way, I do think the action figure market is changing and how the Marvel Legends license (and Star Wars) shakes out will be a big indicator of just how much it's changing.
I've never understood the appeal of Power Rangers, but I was in college when it released so that's understandable.
It's for little kids, isn't it? That's the pattern my kids have followed--they're 9 now, and my son and daughter liked it from ages 4 to 8, but now they seem to have come to the conclusion themselves that it's for little kids so they don't like it anymore.
PR is for little kids as much as any other geek franchise is. If the property gets made into 6" action figure form for $25 plus, it has officially crossed over into "adult collectible" territory.
@enigmaticclarity yeah, I'd say Power Rangers in the US is aimed at the kid demographic probably up to around age 10. Not sure about Japan and what they consider the demographic for the Sentai series to be. My kids had the same experience with it and it was fleeting lasting for maybe a summer. I would guess that like a lot of legacy franchises the adults of today who have nostalgia for it and stayed with it have fueled a lot of the merch sales as they buy for themselves and attempt to get their own children interested. Probably each successive version of the franchise loses more and more of those former kids and doesn't add enough new kids to the equation to really sustain a lot of the momentum it once had. MMPR was just so big in the mid-90s from a retail sales point of view that there's probably always someone who thinks there is money to be made on the franchise.
My understanding with Diamond is that they basically are grandfathered in as their license goes way back with Marvel. They're limited to scale, articulation, and number of releases in a fiscal year. The licensing fee increases must be capped or something to allow for it to keep going as long as it has, or they just don't change. The price of their figures, when adjusted for inflation, really hasn't changed and may have even gone down.
This makes sense, and it may be tied into Diamond's position as the comic book distributor and supplier to comic book stores - so could be a legacy thing that renews when the overall comic distribution contract renews.
I only brought it up as I wondered if they might have some exclusivity to the 7" scale, as the speculation would be that is Todd was to get Marvel (I think unlikely) he would want to do to 7", and depending on how the agreement with Diamond is set that might not be as easy as it seems.
I did think his comment about Disney not wanting to license their product and then have empty shelves was interesting. Ummm...he must not have been to Target in the last eight months to see the perpetually empty ML pegs. McFarlane would keep those pegs full. That's not me picking a side, that's just observation.
You must not shop the same stores I shop... when I hit that Target aisle the McFarlane pegs look pretty much the same as the Marvel pegs - one or two old, unsellable figures languishing and several empty pegs. I haven't seen a "full" McFarlane peg in ages and I don't think it's because they are selling like hot cakes.
MMPR was just so big in the mid-90s from a retail sales point of view that there's probably always someone who thinks there is money to be made on the franchise.
I've never fully understood that popularity, but my guess has always been that adults and older kids see the intentional ULTRA-campy acting, writing, costumes, etc and are turned off, but little kids don't know it's camp and think it's just super-dramatic. But I've never been sure what kids see in it.
I remember wincing the first time I saw clips from it in my early twenties. I still react the same way today, but now I don't say it because I knew my kids liked it. Maybe they still like it a little, not really sure yet. All I know is my son no longer wants figures from it at age 9, but he did as recently as age 7.
So this conversation is swinging wildly about - but I think one of the issues regarding Power Rangers from an action figure marketing perspective is that though the franchise ran successfully for more than 25 years or whatever that "golden era" of Power Rangers for each person - the set of Rangers that was airing when they were in that sweet spot from ages 4 to 8 or whatever - is different for everyone. For the oldest fans - the biggest chunk of the action figure collecting hobby currently - that still lines up with MMPR - which had the longest run, but also has the fans with the deepest pockets at present. But for younger fans - the seasons they may be most connected to will be different - because those started to change pretty rapidly after Zeo or whatever.
I was too old for Power Rangers. I was in High School when it first showed up. I first watched any episodes baby-sitting my nephew. When my son got into Power Rangers Samurai/Super Samurai was the going thing on TV. But for his 4th birthday my brother got him a bootleg collection of every season of Power Rangers to date on DVD - and so he literally watched everything. His personal favorites were Jungle Fury, Dino Thunder, SPD and Samurai. Those were the ones he watched more than once.
But it's hard to market 25 years of a franchise where all of the fans have a different sweet spot and nostalgia for different things. Because MMPR had the longest run of any of the teams, and had the fan base with the most buying power currently - that's the easiest money and why they continually round back to that to sell things.
I do think it's true that Hasbro screwed up the franchise because they killed the model that had been working and don't have a way to replace it with something that will work. Anything totally new is going to be too expensive to pay off. But they've probably broken the old model at this point and can't put it back together. So now they are stuck. Maybe they'll try an animated series - see if they can do something in that space that costs less than a live action production...
But for toys - they've made the original MMPR team and there were diminishing returns on everything else because the market is too fractured for any single thing to be a huge success.
As for the actual central topic of this (tangent) conversation - I'm with the folks saying that if Hasbro were quitting the Marvel license it seems unlikely they would immediately jump into the DC license rather than get out of licensed figure lines altogether. The idea of an open license with multiple operators is interesting, but probably also not super likely.
I'm interested for the speculation to be over and new contracts to be finalized so we know what the future holds.
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