When Sony was broke and looking at shutting down a large portion of their film production, they allowed Marv-Disney to change their contract. You can Google and find the details pretty easily, but here's the jist: Marvel relinquished pretty much all rights of production and profit from the film and Sony relinquished almost all of their merchandising rights, it was literally a miniscule amount Sony retained, but basically Marvel is making as much profit on merchandise from Spiderman movies as they are from their own movies and now they don't even have to produce the flicks to get the cash. Fox still has the original contract, so either Fox or Disney can reject merchandise, but I'm guessing it's Disney because they want to squeeze Fox into giving up the properties.
My guess is, if Fox were desperate enough to sign a deal like Sony, we'd be flooded with toys from the movie. But they're not, so we're going to get miniscule amounts if anything at all.
In the case with Sony, that's exactly it. DisMarv doesn't get any profits from the films, only the merchandise.
But with Fox, they DO get a percentage of the films. So either way, Disney is still getting their cut.
I also don't see how Disney could reject anything based on DoFP. If they have no control over the designs in the movie, how can they control what's produced?
You all saw the prototypes that HT developed, they couldn't be more spot on, so how could Disney reject it? The answer is, they can't. Disney has no veto power there, none. Fox can make whatever they want from the movies, and they chose not to, for whatever reason.
As I said in the other thread, it might be retailers just don't want them, or Hasbro doesn't want to bother (why would they when they can make all the comic book versions they want?).
Weren't Xmen figures were made for the first 2 movies? Were they successful? Well, the costumes for DoFP don't look all that different, so why would they go through that again?
(It's probably the same reason that you won't see anything for the Fantastic Four either. Remember the figures from the last 2 films? I do, and I still see some of them lying around collecting dust, and they were pretty accurate to the comic look.)
With GOTG, everyone is rolling the dice on this. It may be huge, or it may fall on it's ass. No one knows, and no one will know until August. If it's a hit, they have the swag all ready (and molds made, if there's sequels), if not, they'll be stuck with a lot of unsold crap (maybe it might be a hit overseas and the toys will go there). It's happened before and it will happen again. It's all a crap shoot. That's why Hollywood likes prequels, sequels, reboots, etc.
Who knows, maybe the film will be huge, and the toys won't sell (Avatar anyone?), or maybe vice versa. Regardless of whether you have any interest in GOTG, the designs are different and eye catching.
So it has that going for it, along with the Marvel Studios banner.
There's no conspiracy here. Disney still makes money off the properties they don't have the film rights to, so squeezing Sony or Fox out wouldn't make sense. Even if the rights to Spidey, XMen and the Fantastic Four reverted back to them tomorrow, they wouldn't have anything in production for at least ten years. This way, they get none of the grief and all (or some) of the gravy with little to no risk on their end.
But if people want to believe otherwise and hate Disney that much, here's some food for thought: Fox has the rights to STAR WARS forever, and Disney will probably never get that.
Feel better?
