1. As a follow up question about the amount of products showing up at Ollies, Ross and other like store [from last month - Editor]; someone posted a picture of a 6" Black Series figure on sale at Ross. It said the "Original Price" was $29.99 and was being sold for $5.99. What would Ross buy this figure for? I would assume the margin would not be the traditional one Target/Walmart has? Ollie's has Retro figures for $3.99, originally $9.99/$10.99

Is Hasbro loosing money on this? Is it baked into the cost of business?
-- Jeremiah

Hasbro has never publicly commented on closeouts. But, I can tell you the price varies by the item, by the year, and due to a variety of circumstances. Not specific to this scenario: warehouse space isn't free. If you have old stuff not selling, it gets in the way of new goods that you need to turn over - eventually you just have to say "we're done with this" and dispose of it. That can mean closeouts, donations, or even destruction. (I see the latter as something of a sin.)

I don't think anyone will yell at me for saying the closeout guys do not buy these items at the same prices Target/Walmart/Amazon/BBTS/EE/Diamond/etc. would pay. Stores are in business to make money, otherwise they won't buy the goods. Sometimes they have to mark down the goods... but I'd be willing to bet you all the Coca-Cola in Atlanta that Ross has never bought The Black Series toys at the "A" price. (Industry jargon!) I've heard stories about some prices being decided by coin flips.

Is Hasbro making money? You'll have to check their earnings reports. Some items make more money than others - paper goods from Wizards are undoubtedly more profitable than a very complicated action figure made of dozens of parts with a bunch of deco hits and hand-assembly. Your entire portfolio needs to be diverse, so you have some items that are a little riskier, or safer, or for different demographics because you can't predict the market. What if Magic: The Gathering has a bad year in the game space? You're going to be very happy Baby Alive, Nano-mals, and Play-Doh are going to ship to some of your big box accounts.

Is it baked in? I have never asked Hasbro this - but I did read about it in the context of Kay-Bee Toys and McFarlane Toys, and the answer back then was "yes." McFarlane had a rough idea of how much it could sell at full price. They made some extras for QC and just in case stuff took off. The calculation - as I remember reading, I believe, in Tomart's Action Figure Digest - was to make sure they could sell the excess to Kay-Bee, at a lower price, and still make money. Given the economies of scale, it's possible you could even get a lower price-per-unit if the run hits a certain mark. (If you make 1,500 units, the price per unit is high. If you make 50,000 units, a factory may be willing to give a discount - or 60,000, or whatever number they feel is good.)

Getting it right is such a tough job, especially when you take a step back and consider thousands of voices are involved in every step of the way - most of which are not the end user (you.) Lucasfilm and Hasbro can't ask your opinion on new Disney+ shows that they're keeping mega-secret, and then some things wind up marked down. There's a discipline that is really hard to get right, because sometimes you make too many, and other times, you can't make too many. Mando may be increasingly everywhere, but he's sold incredibly well over the past 8ish years - and keeps coming back, in new forms, and selling out. People want to buy him and I am super curious if he's outperformed the prequel era toys at this point.

Ad: Get New Star Wars Pre-Orders at Entertainment Earth! Get Free USA Shipping on Orders $79+

 

2. You mentioned what you considered to be the best-selling Star Wars figure of all time, and suspected Vader. But what about the worst-selling/biggest flop? Either by poor execution (Monkey-face Leia of 1995) to a modern figure that was cut from a film, yet the figures were already made and shoved onto shelves anyway (can't recall name, but maybe from Force Awakens?)
--Chris

It may be hard to remember, but Hasbro (and Kenner and Disney) have made a few thousand figures. Few fans know them all, fewer have them all. Of those thousands, there are dozens that don't sound exciting that a lot of people skipped and don't even know it yet. And they sold out, too.

This one is kind of hard to pinpoint, because pretty much everything sells eventually. For how much, or if anyone has to be appeased due to poor sales, who can know? I overheard some very small production runs over the years and know of a few very short edition sizes. (Hey, some people talk loudly during lunch, and I have ears.) I wouldn't call them flops, they sold. Pretty much anything ever sold in the USA is probably in favorable quantities. Other markets have lower runs - so I would wager Movie Heroes figures from the 2012-2013 line in Europe might be the lowest run movie toys we've seen yet.

I found the tan Phantom Menace 3D-era MH22 Blast-Apart Action Battle Droid (the tan one) and MH24 Zipline Boba Fett figures to be hard to get - but I have no data on European sales. And I am not at liberty to share American numbers that I've heard. Before you name another rare figure - ask yourself this... can you find one for sale at any price right now? They aren't as sexy as a Vlix or a Vintage Collection figure, but odds are you don't have the Movie Heroes-era figures and you don't know someone who does. There are also some terribly scarce light-up lightsaber figures that never made it out here, and a Sandtrooper with light-up cannon, too. They're not valuable, but they're rarely available for sale at any price. Titanium Series 3 3/4-inch Jango Fett was also a short run ("Ross Exclusive") - I was told it wasn't produced, but I got one off of eBay. And some are up for sale today, as opposed to the usual 0 I see.

The maligned 1995 Princess Leia Organa was probably made north of 150,000. It's a super common figure, in an era where edition sizes were huge, and supposedly 250,000 pieces weren't uncommon from a lot of toymakers in the 1990s. People had dozens of them stashed away to pay for little Timmy's college. That Leia once commanded a princely sum on the secondary market for 1995 and a solid chunk of 1996. People were paying $20, $25! She was hard to get! There are likely tens of thousands in storage units, attics, and closets, to be dumped on the market as Generation X moves into smaller homes.

Now if you want to know what the character who, among all their figure releases, had the lowest run I don't know if I could even hazard a guess. There are a lot of one-offs, probably on the exclusive level, that haven't been done a lot. The modern line turns 30 this year and I haven't the rolodex to contact the Jen Donahoes and Jeff Poppers and Andy Espenshades and Derryls DePriest out there to see what they remember. But it's important to remember - not counting test shots or mock-ups - that the line had some rocky periods where some stuff didn't make it to market, or almost didn't make it to market. The Black Series has some vaguely hard-to-find items, but the various 3 3/4-inch kid lines had a lot of stuff that just barely made it out. (Also, you're welcome for some of those.) Whatever's rare, it's probably not Black Series or Vintage. Nobody is saying it's desirable, either.

Become a Patron!

Special thanks to our generous Patreon patrons, especially: JT, Jared, Bobb, Christopher, Daniel, Dan, Tim, Jayson, Matthew, Michael, Robert, Stephen, Todd DrReiCow, Eddie, Jeremy, Mario, and Todd! Thanks for helping us keep the servers on!

FIN

A screening of the 1977 print of Star Wars took place recently, and what's funny is how many people say it's slow, or looks cheap in spots. It was cheap - at $10 million, it was a fairly low-budget picture. In today's dollars, that's closer to $53 million. Sinners was $90 million, A Minecraft Movie was $150 million, and Final Destination Bloodlines was... $50 million. You can make a cheap genre movie, but people tend to not bother. Digital video and editing make some things easier and cheaper (and faster), plus they can help hide some of your problems. Star Wars' Cantina masks are rubbery cheepnis, but you were prevented from knowing that because the cuts between them were so quick you didn't realize that the devil guy couldn't do much more than blink. It's kind of brilliant.

I've been watching a lot of old monster movies lately and you can see limited budgets at work. People made movies that were, hopefully, good enough. Maybe you got Frankenstein's Monster and Ygor, but generally most of the movies used ordinary people and not cool robots, troopers, and space ships. Having watched even the newer editions of Star Wars recently, I can't deny they're a little sluggish in the middle. I see old horror, sci-fi, and fantasy flicks as worthwhile artifacts of their time but sometimes even the newest and best films can be a little clunky.

In less than a year we're probably going to be in theaters watching The Mandalorian & Grogu, which I assume will be kind of cheap for a modern Star Wars movie. Cheap as in production costs - technology has zoomed ahead so much that rendering ships and such is pretty cheap today. I assume a lot of money will be wasted in marketing costs. It'll be a different animal and we're in a totally different era that is unlikely to experience the hype machine of 2015-2019. Star Wars was made for kids in 1977, and this new movie has to be made for kids of 2025... and also, the much harder to please kids of 1977. As the screening of the original film shows, it's impossible to compete with memories of the idea of what a movie meant to you when you were young. With any luck it'll be fun and entertaining, but people have been dunking on sequels since The Empire Strikes Back. Nobody should go in expecting Andor, it should be something for kids and families. But if they want to do haircut jokes, I'm OK with it.

The best thing Disney could do to help the movie out is a healthy slate of merchandise on-shelf with or before the movie. (This will not happen - look at the offering for Fantastic Four this year.) Get those soundtracks, novelizations, comics, toys, video games, and everything else ready to go. Art-of books aren't very helpful 2 years later - people want to go see the movie, flip through the book, and watch the movie again. Heck, I learn character names from toys, trading cards, books, or Dixie cups. I don't anticipate the increasingly spoilerphobic Disney (and fanbase) will let such a thing happen, but having a robust program has people go from the stores to the movie to the stores again to the movie again and maybe streaming and then buying some more stuff at the store. It worked for the prequels!

--Adam Pawlus

Got questions? Email me with Q&A in the subject line now! I'll answer your questions as soon as time (or facts) permit.

Social media? Sure. Bluesky | Fediverse | Mastodon | Tumblr | Instagram

I'm on Instagram! All Pictures from a GameBoy Camera.