Hasbr-uh-oh - Business and Tariffs Discussion

the problem is that comics last for decades; but comic book movies typically get a trilogy and they're out. Unless you do the same villain each time, you typically don't have time for them to be recurring.

Think of James Bond; the villains in those films are typically gone by the end of the movie, aside from Blofeld and a handful of others.

And that's like 30+ movies!!!

CoffeeHorse said:

Superhero films always had a tendency off their villains in one go, but the villains still used to have much meatier roles.

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Nicholson and Ledger each only had one go as the Joker, but each of them did far more than most one-off MCU villain actors got

If we want to stick with Marvel for comparison, there's Tobey's villains.

Okay they're not one-offs anymore. But they were for long enough that I think they still count.

Sabrblade said:

... I actually feel Christian Bale gave a really good and compelling performance in Thor 4.

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Would you swear on it?

LBD Nytetrayn said:

Would you swear on it?

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I mean, judging from the other responses I got from that post in this thread, I'm clearly not the only one here who felt Bale's performance was the only good thing in that movie.

It's just such a shame that Bale nailed the Batman voice from jump in Batman Begins only to dial it up to 11 and the point of parody in TDK.

LordGigaIce said:

It's just such a shame that Bale nailed the Batman voice from jump in Batman Begins only to dial it up to 11 and the point of parody in TDK.

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By contrast, I thought that Terminator: Salvation acquired a certain Narm Charm by having Bale use a similar voice for John Connor. (It really comes across in the teaser trailer.)

since this is the business and tariffs thread for hasbro everyone should be aware that all de minimis exceptions for all countries are ending 29 august here in the USA


so even if you import a figure from japan yourself you're gonna have to pay tariffs come 29 august no matter where it comes from

Fascinating, and maybe more indicative of how Hasbro has changed, corporately, from how it was even 10 years ago.
So, on Mattel's CORPORATE page, they have a full listing of their owned brands. And I do mean EVERYTHING, from Barbie and Hot Wheels, to Computer Warriors and Wheeled Warriors, to frickin' Major Matt Mason!
Surprisingly, Hasbro doesn't and uses generic corporate speak for their "wide and diverse brands" and only their top tier brands being featured. I find it surprising that Hasbro isn't more proactive in promoting its other brands, especially as they have become more prone to licensing out legacy brands.

I don't believe Hasbro even knows the complete extent of all the brands they've acquired at this point.

CoffeeHorse said:

I don't believe Hasbro even knows the complete extent of all the brands they've acquired at this point.

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I find that doubtful if only because any good IP company is going to have a good track of what they could sue on.

I think what makes it strike me so strongly is that…Hasbro and Mattel have seemingly “swapped ideologies” over the past half decade or so. Goldner’s biggest push during his time at the company was to take Hasbro existing brands and turn them into more than just toys and games as well as mining their own legacy rather than pay to use someone else’s (to varying degrees of success, granted). Mattel was the faceless corporate machine that only focused on its biggest house properties and licensed into its weaker areas (like action figures). The past 5 years has seen that mentality shift to where Hasbro is focused only on its strongest properties and licensing out the week while holding on to key licenses. Mattel, however, has seen a renewed effort on building its own properties, bolstered by the success of Barbie. And now we got Masters of the Universe due next year with Hot Wheels well into development with Jon Chu.

Hasbro, meanwhile, has seen most of its developments stalled out over at Paramount (and gutted almost ALL of its own internal means of developing content). It’s just a strange observation I’ve come to when I was perusing that brand page at Mattel.

I think the intervening time suggests why. Hasbro tried it, tried it again, tried it a different way, found many ways not to do it. Or registered that the universe just didn't want it to happen. Transformers paved the way for a landscape that would be littered with Battleship and Snake Eyes andl The Hub and eOne and Transformers One.

Now it's Mattel's turn to try, perhaps having learned from that journey.

Or, like Hasbro, Mattel got one huge hit and has decided to throw a ton of money that way to try and replicate it and in 15 years they'll be right where Hasbro is now.

I'm just glad to see how they've really ramped up MOTU stuff. A decade plus on from a dead reboot that led to the only real remakes being in a subscription service that was both costly and inconsistent (I gather from stories told), the last couple of years have seen shelves fascinatingly full of product, from their own "G1 with knees" to their own "Classics reimaginings" to even their own "Collaborative" mashups with other properties/rosters like WWE (and isn't there a Thundercats one coming?), all with impressive character coverage. Basically all at regular retail too.

I don't even follow or collect the property, but I am very happy for those who do. And sometimes this makes me cautiously optimistic for Mattel getting back the DC license; if it feels like the new non-Horsemen era it should, it'll have potential.

Princess Viola said:

since this is the business and tariffs thread for hasbro everyone should be aware that all de minimis exceptions for all countries are ending 29 august here in the USA

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/30/trump-de-minimis-shipping.html

so even if you import a figure from japan yourself you're gonna have to pay tariffs come 29 august no matter where it comes from

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This might be considered too P&R a point for Transformers discussion, but I have no idea why it isn’t regularly pointed out that tariffs are an extra (heavy) sales tax. I mean, that’s what they essentially are to us consumers – a sales tax on top of a sales tax, pushing up the prices we all pay.

That's exactly what they are, and I see them correctly called out as such in discussions I've been in. Of course, to reach beyond the echo chambers that those probably are, the media needs to broadly and consistently do this instead of all the sanewashing.

lastmaximal said:

Now it's Mattel's turn to try, perhaps having learned from that journey.

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I doubt it. Mattel and Hasbro love to take turns not learning from each other's mistakes.

I'm glad they're doing crossovers now. They've always seemed like rivals that should have been friends.

The hunt for infinite growth means they can't afford to pass up opportunities to make money, even if that means working with a direct competitor. You're seeing it in the console space with Microsoft now being the bestselling publisher on Playstation, and now playstation is hiring for a director of to cooredinate their strategy for publishing on Xbox and Switch, among other devices.

They can't leave any money on the table now.

The trouble is, there's no such thing as infinite growth. There's a finite amount of expansion possible, there's no way around that. Collaborations are just like symbiosis in natural systems, a way to skirt that rule by cooperatively expanding into each other's resources by sharing them to some extent. In the real world this eventually leads to mergers when the companies that collaborate find that they no longer work well as competitors, and become one entity that then divides itself into subunits, but then you run into monopoly laws which can create an even MORE confusing mess of 'mandatory' competition, where there functionally isn't any due to both sides of what would have been a merger that was denied long ago parceling out parts of the market. And then sooner or later one implodes, sometimes deliberately, and the other then moves in.

People need to take more biology and economics courses. They'd be horrified at how much they're the same thing with slightly different vocabulary.