Marvel Signs Toy Deal With Hasbro

Here's the shortest announcement I could find that Marvel is moving its toy and game business from its Toy Biz division (and Toy Biz Worldwide, a company that isn't really a part of Toy Biz) to Hasbro starting in 2007. Marvel will take a one-time charge to reimburse various expenses before clearing the toy part of its business of their books (it might be interesting to track who gets this money); they will also get a major advance and guaranteed money in the low nine-figure range that will probably do a great deal to ameliorate bad news in some dire forthcoming quarterly statement. Hasbro gets to kick things off with Spider-Man 3 bounty.

Although it's odd for anyone who followed Marvel in the 1990s to think of toys as anything other than a strength of the company, the conventional wisdom likely to surface is that getting out of the toy business both reduces the company's exposure to the ups and downs of movie-related toy line hits and misses -- good news in that they'll soon be more directly involved in the ups and downs of movies -- and better aligns Marvel with the kind of strong licensing deals that characterize the company now as opposed to the kinds of corporate make-up ten years ago.
 
posted 8:49 am PST | Permalink
 

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