Major sssspielberg! wrote: ↑Mon Apr 04, 2022 8:07 pm
At the end of the day, regardless of his overall popularity, Godzilla merchandise makes BANK. NECA having the Godzilla license should have been an excuse to print money. There was a gap in the market for more affordable alternatives to SHMA, but they dropped the ball on their non-Monsterverse figures, and I only say that judging by their recent figure offerings, such as the Universal monsters.
This is the big thing people don't get. NECA had an opportunity to outdo the competition and corner the market with viable alternatives to SHMA as well as offering never-before-released super articulated versions of classic Rodan, Mothra, and King Ghidorah designs.
They didn't. They put out nothing but Godzillas and the MonsterVerse Rodan and Mothra.
The reasons for not doing KG 2019 were two-fold/(unconfirmed) three-fold:
- Too big for retail shelf space.
- Too expensive for retail shelves.
- (Unconfirmed) Not available to license.
The last point can be debunked as Randy was interviewed during Toy Fair (or a similar event at least) and confirmed they were going to do "all the monsters [from KOTM]" (paraphrasing). He wouldn't have said this if KG wasn't available for licensing. The existence of the Turtle Van as well as the previous pre-orders for other TMNT and related product proves that the last two remaining reasons were bunk as well. If a KG 2019 was too big and too expensive to put out to retail store shelves, there's no reason why it couldn't have easily been released on the NECA Store direct-to-consumer. NECA's license with TMNT prevented pre-orders for store exclusive items like the 90s movie Turtles from happening at first but that was because NECA was licensing from a company with the toyline master license (Playmates) rather than dealing directly with the IP holder. NECA in the latter days of the Godzilla line's lifetime was dealing direct with Toho, making a pre-order, direct-to-consumer system absolutely viable.
The only instance in which characters might not have been available for licensing is the classic Rodan/Mothra/KG designs but there is no evidence that this was the case and factoring in what I said about dealing direct with Toho almost certainly resolves this.
The whole thing with people harping on NECA after the fact is that new licensees in the past few years have come out and offered products that NECA should have offered from the start and explained that doing so was simply a matter of asking and inquiring with Toho. We shouldn't have had to wait until Super7 got a hold of the license to get something other than Godzilla and the Big Four. Super7 is now signaling that it plans on cornering the market on articulated versions of obscure kaiju like Rose Biollante to Western collectors.
The only things we can really be thankful NECA gave us were affordable figures at big name retailers. Despite that though, the line still could've, and absolutely should've, been way more than it ended up being.
sticking out your gyatt for the rizzler 
