San Diego Comic-Con is in full swing and we got the chance to talk with Ryan, Dwight and Dan from the Marvel team at Hasbro about some of their reveals from the convention and what we might be able to look forward to in the future.
Yesterday, the Marvel team from Hasbro revealed a whole lot of exciting new figures during their panel and you can check out our recap here. Naturally, when getting to chat with Ryan, Dwight and Dan today, I had to ask them which particular pieces they were most excited for.
Ryan: “I was just excited to get the MCU Bruce Banner on the line, because we haven’t had one for many many years, 2015 I think for Age of Ultron and we do so many MCU figures in the past couple of years it was just nice to get that out and I think the likeness is spot on, a great job by the team.”
Dwight: “I think my two favorites things are Power Princess and Crystar. We do a line to complete teams and to complete the Squadron Supreme of America so quickly was a treat and Power Princess is stunningly beautiful and a really solid action figure. And then working with our partners at Marvel, it was a passion project to get Crystar on the line and I remember those toys when I was a little kid and so it’s fun to take an update on that and from the comics of quite a few years ago.”
Dan: “I’m a sucker for the animated series stuff so when we get to do a Peter Parker and an Alistair Smythe, like for me, in my mind’s eye, that’s Peter Parker to me. So I love that two-pack. And I also really love the Daredevil that just came out in that Mindless One wave. Daredevil is one of my favorite characters too and I love that Chip Zdarsky run.”
Obviously, the team is excited for some very different upcoming new figures, so I had to aks about how they manage to find a balance between creating figures based on MCU characters as opposed to more deep cut comic book characters.
“It’s a long conversation,” Dwight said. “Marvel hits us with so much entertainment throughout the course of the year with multiple movies and multiple Disney+ shows, which we all know will by synced to some time window throughout the year and obviously if you have product for that time it’s ideal. You get the most excitement for it, so we have to look at that slate and then we look at the holes of both timing and what pieces of the IP are or are not represented. And if we’ve got something cosmic like Guardians coming out, then maybe in the off time we look at something like X-Men or Avengers to kind of fill the gaps so you’re kind of covering all the different aspects of Marvel because it’s such a deep universe.”
“We try to keep our ears to the street too to make sure that we know what the community is looking for too,” Dan added. “Whether it be a niche character or an MCU character, and our job it to make it as balanced as possible. It’s a delicate dance and I know some communities are not happy with some characters but we try to do a good job.”
With the VHS collections from both X-Men: The Animated Series and Spider-Man: The Animated Series being so popular (and a personal favorite), I asked Dan about any potential future waves of those types of figures and, more specifically, packaging.
“I don’t think that’s out of the question at all. I think so far the fans have been saying overwhelmingly that they’ve loved it, so, and I’m biased cause I love saying that to convince Dwight to make more, but yeah if we have the opportunity I think the door is still open for us to mine those characters,” he said.
Hasbro has been celebrating the 60th anniversaries of both the Avengers and X-Men, but this year also marks the 50th anniversary of Howard the Duck. Naturally, I had to ask if there might be any future plans for a new figure for the Master of Quack-Fu.
“We did a Howard last year in the What If version so maybe we’ll have to come out with a classic version at some point,” Ryan said.
And finally, I had to ask the team about the next HasLab project for Marvel. In recent years, they’ve done ana amazing job with the massive Sentinel figure and the even massive-er Galactus figure, so Marvel fans are wondering what’s going to come next and it turns out we might not have to wait all that long.
“We’re working on it. I was actually just browsing through my emails this morning and there’s all these emails back home about it,” Ryan said. “But yeah, more to come this fall.”
Ryan also took a moment to highlight the big HasLab news from San Diego Comic-Con 2023, which is the new Star Wars The Ghost ship that was revealed today and is available to back now.
“We have internal competitions about that so when we drop our next HasLab, we need the community to come and support us,” Dan added.
“Galactus is still number one in terms of overall sales. We still got the belt,” Ryan joked.
And as always, Dwight managed to leave us with one last tease before we wrapped things up in regards to the next Marvel HasLab project.
“I can say that I approved the check model before I came here for the new one,” he added. “So it’s well underway.”
Now all we can do is wait and speculate as to what that new project will be.
Be sure to follow along with all of our coverage from San Diego Comic-Con 2023 all weekend long.