So how does one December release (Loki) change to a February release and other December release (Joker 2.0) change to a January release and yet another December release (BW) not change at all
I do not mind that they are getting spaced out. It allows me to pick up a couple figures I was going to pass on.
I'm glad you asked!
In the interest of full disclosure my next few paragraphs will be entirely conjecture. Proceed at your own risk. An educated guess is likely to ensue littered with a good dose of common sense. Your internet might stop functioning until irrational fan complaining continues. This usually takes about 5 seconds.
The most probable culprit of the various delays are due to the manufacturing. See Hot Toys makes and designs the products, markets them, sells them, etc. However they do not actually produce them. This production is farmed out to various factories in China. Those factories have other orders from other customers that they make for. These factories line up all their customer orders to make sure that their factories stay working with the least amount of down time for both the factory and their workers. So Hot Toys might be scheduled to have Loki produced in November for a December release. Now it is possible, depending on the size of the factory, that there is a single production line or it is possible that there are multiple. It is also possible that Hot Toys manufactures enough to keep their primary factory busy all year and thus is the sole customer but it is probably more likely that there are other customers slated for October production and December production, leaving Hot Toys their window of production for Loki in the given factory they have placed their order with. If anything is delayed with Loki at all then the factory has to move Loki later in the production schedule. Oft times, if Hot Toys isn’t big enough of a customer to bully them, then the factory will leap frog someone else’s production into the November slot and Loki will get shoved to the next most convenient spot.
Now let’s travel further down the rabbit hole to see what we find.
You’ve got lots of different parts in these figures. It is highly unlikely that a single factory is making all the various parts because it is unlikely that a single factory does metal work for the accessories, plastic molding for the bodies, fabric sewing for the garments, and cardboard & plastic production for the boxes. So that means that a delay in any one of the various factories making the ‘parts’ will result in a delay at the factory assembling the final product.
Follow me Alice and this time just eat the blue pill.
Now we travel all the way back to where our small little mythical wonders are conceived. Yes, this is the oft forgotten place called the Land or Raw Materials. We have fabrics that must be woven and dyed. We have plastics that must be prepared for the molds. We have metal that must be purchased to form little pins and doohickies. We have paper products that must be sourced for box fabrication, etc. This land is also just as susceptible to the infuriating delay. Perhaps there is a shortage of a given raw material, perhaps there is a large customer that bumps our smaller Hot Toys from the supply chain in order to have plastic pellets for 100,000 50 gallon plastic coolers made on the spot. Perhaps Walmart places a last minute order for 200,000 metal folding camp chairs and sucks up all the available raw metal that was sitting waiting for Hot Toys and so the supplier has to extrude more. Etc etc etc etc.
All these various parts make up a larger part of the supply chain. A delay in any of them means a delay in the final product. It happens all the time and has been happening even more often out of China in the past couple of years than prior because of the added wonder of labor issues. Something the Chinese government never allowed to take place in the past they are letting happen without any word…that is strikes for wage increases, strikes for this or that, etc. For the Chinese this was inevitable as they are going through the same industrial revolution that our country went through in the first part of the last century.
Now we returned you to your regularly scheduled program of fan lamenting. Be sure to tune in next time when we cover why the price increases to the figures are completely understandable. You may just see some entitled fan go into cardiac arrest.
but it'll be like christmas
