>>10081397>>10081389Toy manufacturers are more intimately tied into whole-franchise planning than they used to be, with toys being one of the more expensive but smaller pieces of a much larger project of shows, websites, apps, [usually low-effort] console games, and general marketing.
And that’s not even the first hurdle, unfortunately—whether a concept has enough buy-in from investors and CEOs to see the light of day, whether it ultimately includes toys or not, comes down to whether they feel they can reliably predict consumer buy-in and return on investment. And not only is fan interest an unreliable indicator of whether/how much money a franchise will make, the metrics which companies DO rely on are “has a similar concept made a profit recently enough that the target audience is likely to also spend money on this idea.”
Hence you get an endless cycle of revivals, because they’ve been shown to make money before; but generally you either get revivals of very recent series targeted to kids, smaller revivals of series approx 30 years old targeted to adult collectors, and in either case you have a lot of the things that made that series stand out made less different/quirky than it used to be in hopes of garnering more normie interest.
It’s the same as catering to our political system, really. “Be different enough to be noticed, but not too different. Also, be something we’re familiar with and used to like, and only come back once we’ve forgotten your flaws.”
