Hasbro Tidbits From The London Comic Con

Hasbro showed off a few new items today in London, but they also spoke a bit about other things during the Q&A that followed the presentation that may be of interest to collectors. So click through to find out more!

I will provide you with some bullet points here, in no particular order

• Hasbro confirmed that they have plans for TVC for years to come
• TVC Special Action Figure sets will all have the double bar A New Hope look from now on and have multilingual cards. Hasbro also hopes to bring more product to the EU because of the multilingual packaging, since no mininum number of orders needs to be met to justify making extra packaging for the EU. This is certainly interesting to hear, so it seems retailers in Europe don’t really order all that much from Hasbro sometimes. And making multilingual product packaging is apparently not so much a cost cutting measure, but an attempt to still justify sending toys to the EU, even if orders from retailers don’t meet the required minimum, which would have prevented a EU release before.
• Hasbro also hinted at Disney once again withholding information from then. When they were asked about a TROS Emperor Palpatine figure they basically said they have no idea what he looks like in the movie and they will only find out when they see the movie for the first time. It seems Disney is simply not learning from past mistakes. They already withheld TFA Luke and TLJ Crait Luke from Hasbro in the past.
• Hasbro said they decided to only make one KoR for TVC and TBS for now, because they want to know what they will actually do in the movie – so they apparently have zero info on them as well. It seems they are wary of the Phasma or Praetorian Guard effect here, where a cool looking character is reduced to almost nothing in the movie. So they are waiting for the movie here and also for fan feedback before more KoR will come – but it sounds as if this is certainly a possibility. But they did not go all in and made all the KoR in case fans (collectors) will dislike them. I think this is a smart choice by Hasbro.
• Hasbro also said they do have plans for The Clone Wars in 2020, but as usual nothing can be revealed.
• Likewise, Hasbro also said they do have plans for Empire Strikes Back in 2020, but again, nothing can be revealed. They once more emphasized that in 2019 the focus is Rise of Skywalker, Mandalorian and Fallen Order (certainly mandated by Disney), so they will not talk about anything else really, but they acknowledged that more will come for both ESB and TCW in 2020.
• Hasbro said there will definitely be more Black Series Deluxe figures! They felt Palpatine is not a Deluxe figure, apparently since he’s based mostly on the previous release with a new head and soft goods. They also said they were only able to make the Palpatine with Throne  set because they had an exclusive retail partner with Amazon.
• Patrick once more promised that Zeb will come in the Black Series – eventually.
• Hasbro heard the complaints about too many TVC repacks, so they are trying to strike a better balance here with 25% of the figures being repacks. But they will go ahead and try to give collectors “smart repacks”.
• And Patrick once more pointed out that Hasbro can only make figures which retailers/etailers actually order from them, they need a minimum number of orders for a figure, so it’s not as if Hasbro will just dump a pallet of figures on the doorstep of retailers and tell them to have fun with it, this is always a dialogue between retailers and Hasbro.

And while nothing was said about the license, that is still up for renewal as far as we know, Hasbro gave off the impression that they have plans for a lot of things going into the future. Based on that you get the impression Hasbro will definitely keep the license. Which would certainly be the preferred choice.

Overall both Patrick and Sam were enthusiastic as ever. More reveals will come at the next few European conventions, so stay tuned!

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