There’s also rumors about IdW losing gi Joe too, but let’s be honest, IDW’s condition and gi joe becoming a dying franchise makes it seem like a forgone conclusion.

 

Me in the thread.

 

That rumor pops up now and again constantly over the last decade. It's a dumb rumor, Disney has no interest. Disney has been moving away from ownership of non-core media like video games and toys in recent years, focusing on parks and filmed media, and licensing out for the rest. Post the Fox merger, they aren't hurting for new IP like Hasbro's, and their film rights are tied up with Paramount for at least a few years. Plus Hasbro (like every other major toymaker) is expending into media too, so buying Hasbro would create inefficiencies, not solve for them.

There are lots of bad rumors out there, but this is one that makes very little sense.

 

It isn't necessarily most are resistant to change, it's just a lot of people try to make liking or disliking stuff a moral issue. As a non-TF example, go visit the Netflix Cowboy Bebop thread. Even if we explain in detail why we dislike the changes, the defenders just dismiss it as people hating change. A lot of people don't hate it being different, they just don't like a lot of the stuff that was changed.

Personally, I would love for a new continuity that incorporates the various iterations like Legacy, but stop focusing on the war. It should still be going, but make it a backdrop, not the main focus.

 

Indeed. Hasbro's main value to Disney would be in IP, not merchandising. And of Hasbro's most valuable owned IPs, Transformers stands head and shoulders above the rest, followed by Magic the Gathering and Power Rangers, and athen a tier below that everything from GI Joe to MLP to Monopoly. If you want to cut through it, you could say maybe Transformers and Power Rangers would most interest Hasbro, but Disney already owned Power Rangers and sold them off. Transformers is valuable, but it's not Marvel valuable or Star Wars valuable. Disney has made back what they spent on Lucasfilm and Marvel many times over now. But Lucasfilm, despite Star Wars, was actually a pretty small company that Hasbro bought for $4 billion. And Marvel's pre-Disney valuation of $3 billion was pocket change (Disney bought it for $4 billion, at a rate of $30 per share). By contrast have to spend about $20+ billion to buy Hasbro, a company currently trading at about $100 per share. Not even 10 Transformers movies would make that money back in ticket sales or merch.

So yeah the numbers make no sense for Disney. Star Wars and Marvel were both way undeveloped goldmines that were sitting there at a bargain price. The Hasbro IP chest is pretty meager outside of a few properties and has already been fully developed.

 

People not buying whatever idw makes (be it comics or tv shows) is pretty much the ultimate form of a fuck you.

 

Star Wars was bought for way more than it was worth.

 

Transformers is not on the same level as Star Wars.

 

?

 

You know what you wrote.  

Seriously though, I was just correcting the idea that they got a bargain on SW.

 

I wrote about this at length in the comic sections of the board before, but I think IDW deserved to lose the license, probably years ago for systemic mismanagement of the property.

Comics is a visual medium. Years ago, Transformers was not only one of (if not the best) looking comics on shelves with a good story, it was selling 50,000+ copies a month. Not crazy numbers but extremely respectable for a Triple-A intellectual property. I would not expect Transformers to ever do Batman or X-Men numbers sustainably, but a 35k-50,000k bracket is possible. And Transformers did it for a while.

And then it didn't. despite an increasingly rich worldbuilding (and generally good, even sometimes great art), the ever more esoteric and convoluted stories and half-baked reboots saw sales slip to 18,000, then 12,000 then 10,000, now 8000 on the way to 6000. And it's not like this is happening to comics as a whole: sales have been stable and seen slight growth as a whole for years now. This happened to Transformers.

Fact is, in this visual medium, when stories are bland and confusing and the art is bad, people stop buying. People come back if you give them reason to come back. Even parts of IDW1 I l iked were also huge reasons for potential readers to stay away. And IDW2? Forget it. It's the worst looking, least interesting book Transformers has ever had and it has the sales to reflect it. Honestly, it should sell way less.

Cutting through it: editorial decisions, which have driven creative decisions, have seen Transformers sales shrivel to a fraction of what they were when the license was awarded, despite overall stability in the market. That means they deserve to lose it and it should go to someone else. My personal viewpoint is Hasbro should do it in house, 100% digital, through the Pulse app. Because with Marvel moving to Penguin-Random House, DC cutting 40% of its books, swapping to Lunar and leaning hard into Digital and Diamond's future less certain than ever, simply moving the license to Boom or Dark Horse commits Transformers comics to the oblivion of the Direct Market, which has no future. "Transformers via Boom Studios" would be back in 6k-8k sales land within a handful of issues. Because in 2021 the idea of going to a local comic shop to spend $4 to buy a printed book that was drawn, inked and colored on a computer and looks best on a tablet or phone is fundamentally stupid. Marvel and DC know this is the case, which is why they've made the business moves since the start of the pandemic they did - it accelerated what was coming, the divorce from the Direct Market. Simply swapping Direct Market-oriented publishers isn't the solution.

Hence why pushing Transformers digital comics through the Hasbro Pulse App is the smartest play. It also has the benefit of being very cheap for Hasbro.

 

Oh I thought I was quicker on the edit lol. Yeah I agree that they didn’t necessarily get a good deal, but SW is a cultural juggernaut whereas transformers is a somewhat popular brand from the 80’s that’s mainly known as a cultural punching bag and not a industry revolutionizing series.

 

The flourishing of the franchise on Disney+ and merchandise sales of $3 billion a year tell a different story. Yeah, the sequel trilogy was generally trash. It was also very lucrative for Disney and most importantly, it's been MCU and Star Wars together which are driving the explosive growth of Disney+, which is pretty much Disney's core non-theme park business now.

 

It's not just the cost, though that's obviously a huge part of it. Marvel was an owner of lucrative brands with a publishing company attached. That was a great value-add, because it gave them a low-risk idea factory and a creative talent pool it could leverage for the core business of telling stories. I mean, the characters, plot, and style of the new Hawkeye series is all from a recent comics miniseries, to use just one example.

What does Hasbro offer? A toy manufacturer. That's not a value-add, that's a whole new industry, with its own problems and dependencies. The benefit of Transformers IP pales against the negative of having to manage an entire industry segment that is foreign to them.

 

That has nothing to do with it. At the time they bought Lucasfilm, it was valued at around $3.3 billion, at best. Lucas, however, would only sell if he got the same deal as Marvel, so Disney overpaid by at least three-quarters of a billion.

 

And building on my post above, that's basically the same argument here: Hasbro is not a comics publisher. It's not in their interests to try to solve for the industry's market problem. Why take on the cost of making these things when they have no direct experience and can't monetize them?

 

A lot of this talk about Disney buying Hasbro also seems to come from the idea that Disney can just about buy anything with no issue. I don't think that they're going to be able to purchase another company unless they sell off two. The Fox deal was under a lot of scrutiny by the federal government and barely passed from what I remember. Antitrust laws probably prevent them from doing another big deal like that, it's why they haven't just outright bought up Sony Film Studios to get the film rights to Spiderman back.

 

Hasbro can't and won't ever "do it in house", they make toys not comic books. They are not a publisher and they really don't have the resources to be one.

 

The fandom, thankfully, is much more expansive than what you’ll find on these boards. Whatever thoughts/opinions seem prevalent here will have totally different reactions from another sub-sect of fans. For all its messiness and inconsistency, I think IDW1 really excelled at certain points in attracting fresh new audiences to the franchise. I hope whatever happens to the license from here will attempt to carve new ground again.