fantastic_four

The general decline in MCU quality for those films was one thing, but there are two other ones. The first is that Marvel moved ALL of those films, and they did it after Hasbro had already committed to having figures in the stores. In some cases those movies got moved multiple times. For example Hasbro initially held back their Eternals figures, but then Marvel moved it again after Hasbro had already started shipping them to stores, and by then it was too late. I don't believe the figures for ANY of those films you listed, plus the ones before those up to Black Widow, hit stores within 3 months of when their associated movie released. That's a big problem. I understood that for the 2020 and 2021 films due to the pandemic, but Marvel STILL keeps moving movie dates constantly and screwing Hasbro over. Why did they move the Marvels this year? Can't really blame the pandemic anymore, although certainly that placed some pressure on the dates to slip. Whatever their reason for constantly changing release dates it's screwing Hasbro over, BIG time. There is another problem as well--Target has become absolutely terrible at selling toys in general, particularly Marvel Legends. They screw up constantly since early 2022, and I don't get it. The main problem specific to Legends they have is that in 2021 they switched from ordering one or two boxes of 8 assorted figures to ordering 4 to 7 boxes of 5 figures per store. So every store now gets 5 versions of every figure, but not every figure is ever going to sell five copies, particularly in one store. They need to switch back to assortment boxes of 8, and ever since they made this change at least half of what they buy ends up on clearance. It was clear that was a mistake in the moment, and they've never solved it. But that's just one problem they have--they also screw up everything else related to inventory management as well. Many Legends waves never go up for pre-order, or some that do never actually fulfill ANY pre-orders. Many waves now sold in stores NEVER get listed on the web site. They've become just awful at selling toys now, and there's no clear reason for why. Target has been my go-to place for buying toys for years, so it has been frustrating to see them become so terrible at it.

You left out a few things they cancelled--the creation of any new X-Men characters since Fox automatically got film rights to all of them, plus Wolverine--who also was resurrected in 2018. And what's significant about 2018? That's after Fox and Disney came to terms on Disney's purchase of them. So while I agree that FF isn't a premium seller, them cancelling it along with all of the other Fox comic-based properties then re-starting them after Disney bought Fox makes the intent pretty clear.

I still wonder why Marvel took this approach with the X-Men and Fantastic Four to freeze out Fox, but they didn't do it with Spider-Man. I guess they saw a chance of it working with Fox but not with Amy Pascal at Sony?

It's not just FF #48--it's every issue on every title released around this time. I know Spidey #33 was released around the same time FF #48 released and it has the exact same "arvel omics roup" bad wrap, and the same is also true with the other titles.

I held out for many, many years on a high grade copy of this book for that exact reason; something like 80% of all copies are miswrapped as you describe. Snagged a quick high-ish grade with a great wrap first, then held out for a 9.6 copy for almost a decade. My copies have off-white pages, but I prioritize wrap over that for slabbed copies since you can't even see the interior. From 2000 to 2010 I don't recall seeing a 9.6 or 9.8 with great wrap and white pages even one time, although since 2010 I've seen at least one or two like that.

There's a dude who specializes in figuring out celebrity heights both currently and at their peak. He thinks Perlman is a bit under 5' 11" now, but used to be around 6' 0" when he was younger. https://www.celebheights.com/s/Ron-Perlman-67.html The guy in the pic on the page is the guy who runs the site; he's Irish and is 5' 8" for comparison against Perlman. He makes an effort to get pics with celebrities when he can to post on his site for comparison purposes. In general male celebrities tend to exaggerate their height by two inches if they're 6' 3" and under; if they're taller than that they tend to either report their height accurately or report their height as lower so that they don't lose parts for being too much taller than the other actors. In that celebheights entry above you can see quotes from Perlman where he has claimed in the past that he was 6' 2", but he likely never was. Any leading man under 6 feet almost universally exaggerates their height. Robert Downey, Jr. has been wearing 2 inch lifts during the entire time he played Iron Man, including in public appearances. Not sure if he wore lifts before Iron Man, but he always exaggerated his height by at least two inches as is standard. I mostly think he wore the lifts so he didn't look shorter than Gwyneth Paltrow since she plays Pepper Potts, but Paltrow is a bit over an inch taller than he is and always looks much taller than him when she wears heels that more than offset his lifts.

I bought the sarcophagus alone and I agree, it's great. Mostly bought it for Egyptian decor in scenes with other characters that makes sense for such as Indiana Jones, Apocalypse, Khonshu, Moon Knight, Shadow King, etc.

Blob is a candidate for top 10 Marvel Legends of 2023. Love that figure! Wouldn't exactly call him classic since Blob was more human-sized for his first few decades at 5' 10" but just drawn to be morbidly obese; even Byrne drew him around that size when he added him to the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants in the 1980s as shown in the pic below where he's shorter than Pyro. Eventually artists did what they always tend to do with size-based characters and just kept making him bigger and bigger, eventually exceeding 7 feet in height. This new Blob figure is huge in both girth and stature like the modern versions.

Also picked up the Hammond Collection carnotaurus figure earlier in the week shown in the pic below (parasaurolophus and baby stegosaurus are on the left, t-rex and brachiosaurus lower half are in the background, and carnotaurus is the reddish one on the right). Absolutely amazing figure and probably the best articulated dinosaur made to date with a full range of motion, terrific sculpt, and REALLY good paint. Mattel is killing it with Hammond Collection line and mostly doing a better job than the only other articulated dinosaur line ever made called "Beasts of the Mesozoic" that doesn't match the sculpt, articulation, or paint quality Mattel is doing in the Hammond Collection.

Picked up the new Marvel Legends Green Goblin from "No Way Home" yesterday. Pretty pricey at $50, but wow, definitely one of the top ten Legends figures of the year. Nice articulation, an INCREDIBLE Willem Dafoe head sculpt, intricate sculpt details throughout, and a great glider with the same tilting wings that the gilders in the two Spidey films ("Spider-Man" from 2002 and "No Way Home" from 2021) had. Tons of posing options to seat him on the glider since they designed the boot stirrups to both rotate and swivel.

There's something about her I can't quite put my finger on, either...but I'd sure like to.

Was that a trailer for an upcoming SyFy original? If so, I'm guessing it's set in the Sharknado universe.

I am still on the fence. I had more or less stopped buying Joes, but this ship was my #1 single most wanted fantasy vehicle as a kid, so the fact that it is now going to be a reality may be too much to resist. But $500...oof. We'll see. I find it very interesting that they're offering a set of O-ring figures as well, makes one wonder if Hasbro isn't totally done with O-ring for the foreseeable future. I like the designs of the Reaction figures, as I'm a Sunbow cartoon Joe guy, and if they were to start making more o-ring figures in that style, I'd be totally onboard. Didn't know this existed. Two questions: When did this crowdfunder start? I see the early bird ended three weeks ago, and the campaign has almost another month left. Is this a 3-month crowdfund? What's the difference between the O-ring and "ReAction" figures? I know the O-ring is the rubber band used by older Joes from the 1980s so I assume "ReAction" is an alternate design, but why would Super 7 keep making figures using the O-ring, and why would they include both? Don't the rubber bands disintegrate? Is there some retro engineering nostalgia demand for O-ring figures going on, kind of like the way some music enthusiasts pine for older record technologies and collect vinyl records?

You can get two-thirds of most figure lines on sale, clearance at major retail, or clearance at discount retail. The trick is identifying the third that will never make it to clearance. With Marvel as an example it's the popularity of the character, although there can be other factors as well. So in general you usually won't see Spidey, Iron Man, Captain America, etc at clearance unless it's a low-popularity variant costume they're wearing.

They seem to dump it to all of the discount stores. In my area you can find dumped Hasbro stuff at Ollies, Marshalls, Burlington Coat Factory, and Ross. I recently visited all of the Marshalls in my region because they had dumped their failed Starting Lineup NBA figures to Marshalls. I bought four of the eight they made from Hasbro Pulse, but my son really likes the figures and wanted me to get the rest so I went looking for them at Marshalls. Found one among four stores, but that was it.

What makes that bias not ingrained, do you believe? Something ingrained is believed, firmly fixed, and difficult to change. Seems to fit a significant number (but not all) of negative viewpoints expressed in this thread and the one about the Barbie movie. My son is a chauvinist because he prefers hanging out with other boys, and my daughter is the same way. But neither of them have an actual ingrained bias against the opposite sex. My daughter doesn't dislike me, and my son doesn't dislike his mom. In group situations both of them will play with the opposite gender if they're just coincidentally around, but they don't bond with the opposite gender much yet, if at all. We all tend to somewhat grow out of that chauvinism after puberty, but certainly most of us also maintain it throughout our lives to varying extents. Adult men still mostly befriend other adult men, and the same goes for women. My kids would be misogynist or misandrist if they actively refused to associate with the opposite gender and consistently expressed their disdain for the opposite gender. That's pretty rare, and I've never seen it myself in a kid. I'm also not sure I've seen it in an adult in my own life, but we see it in the media or in reports of gender-based crime. We also could be around misogynists/misandrists who have learned to hide it. I have no idea who in this thread is a misogynist because I could only identify it by observing a pattern of behavior across multiple incidents. It's ingrained if you see someone doing it over and over and over within many different contexts. I tend to presume chauvinism since it's pretty pervasive, and I save accusations of misogyny for people where it's clear they hate or have that repetitive ingrained bias against women. But Gen Z--and plenty of people from older generations--don't even know what chauvinism is since accusations of misogyny are now thrown around so much more often.

Any long-term creative committee would have to replace its members as time went on. I think Bendis was on Perlmutter's committee, and obviously he would have had to be replaced after he left Marvel. Ideally the committee would try hard to maintain consistency with previous iterations of the committee. This is essentially the same role Marvel's Editor-In-Chief filled, except Perlmutter gave it to a group of people instead of just one. Maybe it was the fact that it was a committee that was the problem, and instead it should just be one person like Feige has been, not sure. Although I'm sure Feige also relies heavily on his inner circle he works with. I'm not really sure how much of the continuity content comes from him and how much of it comes from his assistants...I can't even remember their names right now, although I've seen them several times over the years.

80% of people who use that word skip the "ingrained" part, and I'm not a fan of the definition due to that--it needs to go further in differentiating men with a bias towards men as opposed to men who have an active and perpetual disdain for women. Rapists are misogynists. I think Harvey Weinstein must have been a misogynist given what he did to actresses, but I'm not totally sure of it without learning more about him. Most of the other MeToo celebrities who got cancelled weren't misogynists, but they certainly got called that a lot. But that term gets thrown at men who mostly just have a bias towards men, and it's irritating.

Iger has been spreading him too thinly. When he tried to get Feige to go in and clean up Kennedy's mess with Star Wars I immediately facepalmed--WHAT? Leave this guy to keep creating magic with Marvel, dude! He's done what nobody else has ever done and you want to put MORE on his plate? The biggest example of this was giving him control of both the comics AND the television shows--he's never done either one! And it's the shows that he's struggled the most on. They're all average, maybe slightly above average, at best, whereas when all he had to work on were the films he had been producing for almost his entire adult life he created the largest, most cohesive set of superhero films ever made with the Infinity Saga.

With the auteur theory of film one person controls everything. Stan Lee's "Marvel Method" actually gave him far LESS control that the method the vast majority of writers have. The usual way of creating a comic is roughly like this: Writer writes a semi-complete outline for the story and plot of the comic. Most of them include notes for each page--or even down to the panel level--for what the artist should draw. Dialogue is usually included here as well to help guide the artist, but I think some writers fill in the exact dialogue later. Artist takes the outline and draws art to match the writer's plot. Writer reviews the art with whatever form of dialogue they've written. Sometimes they tweak their dialogue, sometimes they ask the artist to tweak the art. Once the art and dialogue and expository panels are complete the inkers, letterers, and colorists take it from there. Stan Lee skipped step one entirely and let the artist determine the plot. He would discuss the story verbally with the artist, but then leave it to the artist to determine how he wanted to tell the story. Lee would then go back and fill in dialogue that matched the artist's plots evident in the art. All of this gave Stan LESS control, and it's quite divergent from the auteur theory because he shared creative control with the artist. Many fans prefer to credit Kirby, or Ditko, or whoever the artist was over Stan for writing the comics. They're not wrong, but it was definitely both of them, and Stan had the final word. Sometimes he would just toss the entire set of artwork if he severely disagreed with the artist's plot direction, but I doubt he did that much. There wasn't time since he was controlling the story and dialogue for every comic in the 1960s.

Accurately identifying a misogynist is pretty hard online unless they're being extremely obvious about it. Most of us are chauvinists to varying degrees. Most little boy are chauvinists--they love boy superheroes, hate the girl ones because they're girls. My son and all but one of his friends are chauvinists too. Gen Z seems to want to call that misogyny, but that's not what it is. Little boys with a deep hatred for women are rare, as is that trait in most adult men.

Maybe you did--you were referring to others anyway, but I wasn't sure who. Who called who a misogynist?

There's a trend of mis-using that word over the past decade or so. What 80% of people mean when they say "misogyny" is actually chauvinism. Actual misogynists are pretty rare, but people who have an obvious bias towards their own gender are plentiful.

MOST directors would have never wanted to work for Feige for the exact reasons Nia DaCosta expressed because they're believers in the auteur theory of film, and she's not the first director Feige has lost because they prefer it. I'm a believer in auteur theory as well, but I understand its limitation--it doesn't work for continuity across multiple works. When you're tasked with creating a cohesive universe of fiction that spans a hypothetically infinite number of films you just can't leave creative control in the hands of the director alone. Does DaCosta understand that? I can't tell that she does, but what I can say is that if she didn't know Feige was going to have some control over her work she wasn't paying much attention when she took the job. I get that fans think Feige has lost his touch. I've outlined why I think he hasn't. We'll see in Phase 6 and 7.

Favreau did great. Nolan did great, too. But not everybody is a Favreau, and even Favreau isn't always as good as Favreau sometimes is. He's up and down. The problem with most studio execs is that they have no real talent at writing, and they don't know much about the content. EVERY exec has been like that with two exceptions--Feige, and Geoff Johns. Maybe one of the other short-lived DC Films execs too, I forget who has had that job right now. Avi Arad is the most vivid example of this kind of typical exec--he had no idea what would work, he just hired the best director or screenwriter and hoped they would figure it out. Arad seemed to have almost no sense for content continuity across directors at all like Feige has had. Sometimes an Arad, or a Kathleen Kennedy, or whoever hired Nolan will hire the right creatives and it'll be awesome. Sometimes they won't and we'll get an Elektra. And sometimes they'll muck up a good thing like Arad did with Sam Raimi and we'll get a Spider-Man 3. Perlmutter is a much longer discussion, and I think we have another thread for that. I'd love to return to it though because I LOVED the concept of his Marvel Creative Committee because it seemed like it would solve the exact issue I just described--Perlmutter knew he didn't know how to guide Marvel's films, so he tasked Marvel's best creatives with doing it for him. I loved that idea from the start, and I'm STILL not sure why it ended up failing. I'd love to explore it in more depth though because I still think that would be better than anything DC has tried to date, i.e. a creative committee consisting of DC's best creative talent from the comics.