stack32

So does that mean basically anyone with a few extra bucks can have their own exclusive?

Appeal for an individual is certainly subjective, but I think we can make some pretty definitive judgements about the overall appeal of at least some characters or army builders to those who are likely to buy them. I'd love for the line to make it to the point where they need to use aliens like the Hirogen or Suliban, but they're unlikely to add a lot of appeal for many (most?) collectors.

If we're talking DD villains, Gladiator would make a great minimate: Not real high on my want list, but he'd definitely look cool.

Well, I think you've made my point: half of those are going to be less-than-appealing to even serious fans. I would take the Breen though. And I'm not sure Borg work as a traditional army builder since drones all look a little different. With the right accessories you can probably make 2 or 3 different looks from one figure, but more would seem pretty repetitive.

How many aliens are there that people will actually want to army build though? Klingons, Romulans, Cardassians, maybe Ferengi? After that you start getting into bland forehead makeup territory and I know I wouldn't be crazy about buying two of those to get the characters I actually want.

I'm very interested to see what kind of lineup DST would go with in a second wave. They've pretty well covered the main variants for captains, except for maybe Locutus. Do they go heavy on other crew members? Do they risk more Voyager and Enterprise sets? Wish listing is easy, but turning that into a lineup that would sell seems like a challenge.

Iron Monger?

After seeing all of the armors I hope the boxset is mostly concentrated on other characters because most of those armors are awful. Or just lazy. I'd much rather see another Stark variant than just about any of them.

The army builder isn't immediately obvious to me but I love the sound of three new villains.

We are getting a Superior Spider-Man minimate about ten minutes after he started appearing in the comics, so I think Chuck is still on his game. I am a little surprised that this wave isn't Spider-Man themed though.

I don't want to derail the thread too much more, but I'm pretty sure time travel is fairly consistent in Trek, at least in every episode and movie I can think of: When a change is made in the past it alters the timeline until someone puts things right. So Abrams basically wiped out all of classic Trek to make his movie. Somewhere in the future Guinan is telling Picard that the timeline is screwed up and someone needs to fix it. The alternate timeline approach doesn't work for me because it (surprisingly) isn't really used often in the series, and not in conjunction with the time travel stories I can think of, but I can certainly understand it being a reasonable explanation for others. Honestly, if I didn't find the rest of the movie unforgivably stupid I'd probably let the whole thing slide. I suppose what I'm really saying is that we need a "The City on the Edge of Forever" boxset with the Guardian of Forever and Edith Keeler in it. I'm sure we can all agree on that.

It would have been brilliant if any of the writers had a clue as to how time travel works in Star Trek. That really does sound like a mess and I suppose it explains a lot of the odd decisions regarding marketing and tie-ins. Still, Abrams was a fool if he thought classic Trek product would cease to exist because of his movies.

Found some good deals on Amazon so I picked up Silver Surfer and Ghost Rider. Surfer is good but Ghost Rider is fantastic, I really like the expression on his face. And, since I've given Funko a hard time about paint, I have to admit both of these had pretty sharp paint applications.

I hope these are really successful, but it's not that hard to imagine they might not be. I think DST is well aware of how difficult it can be to sell Trek product, even if there is a movie out with the name on it. I don't blame them at all for taking a wait-and-see approach, especially if it helps get us more characters in the long run.

I care more about characters than costumes, so if the series can live up to the hype I'd definitely be interested in minimates.

No luck finding these at my local TRU this morning. Looks like it might be another week until they hit.

Did anyone see the design sheets posted on Facebook? They look pretty fantastic. Kirk is shown with an alternate screaming head.

Did the Alpha Flight sets sell well enough for AFX to take a risk like that again? The clearance prices I've seen suggest not, but maybe I'm wrong.

I saw the DC Domo Pops in B&N the other day. I only looked at Batman, but the paint on all three they had was awful. Apparently Michael Crawford found the same thing. I thought about buying some of these from Amazon, but after checking out the product it just doesn't seem worth the risk.

Don't we have 2 astonishing costumes for Cyclops? But yeah, depends on the look. But I'll buy any good looks, modern or classic. There were two different "Astonishing" Cyclops costumes, one by John Cassaday and one by Simone Bianchi. Or, an "awesome" one and an "awful" one. Which for me shows that modern vs. classic isn't so important as a good costume vs. an ugly one. I'll take characters I like in good costumes regardless of the time period they were designed.

I think this quote from Shane Black in the article Groundhog posted pretty much sums up why they felt they could make a change to Mandarin: Also, The Mandarin, as Kevin has pointed out — it's not like he's a classic villain in the sense you go, "Oh my god, remember that great Mandarin story?" You go, "Well, no, not really, do you?" "No, I guess we don't."

I've found it fascinating how so many of the fans who don't like it feel the need to call it the worst movie ever. No debating plot choices or character arcs, it just sucks. I guess I expected a higher level of discussion (in general, not referring to here) from fandom. In retrospect I suppose that was silly.

So anyone who likes the movie isn't an Iron Man fan? I get the reaction, though I'm not sure how many people really think of Mandarin as being Iron Man's Moriarty. I think the big issue here is that there are comic fans who have this vision of a great villain in the movie that would work for them but not the rest of the public that will push the movie to a billion dollars.

I think it's pretty obvious why you would use that kind of twist in one instance and not the other. One of them is the greatest villain in comics, the other... is definitely not.

I 100% agree with you here. There are plenty of legitimate criticisms of this movie and I can understand people not liking it, but I've skimmed the internet today and seen some really stupid comments, even to the point of someone saying RDJ should be replaced as Stark. That's just dumb.