WizKids & Hasbro Announce New Miniatures Range
February 27, 2019 by cassn
WizKids have announced an enhanced licensing deal with Hasbro which will enable several IP franchises to come to the tabletop as miniatures.
WizKids, industry leaders in both painted and unpainted miniatures, will be bringing such family classics as G.I. Joe, My Little Pony, and Transformers to the tabletop. In a statement, WizKids president Justin Ziran said:
“Much of the WizKids team has grown up with these cherished brands and are thrilled to be bringing them to life with the high definition sculpting processes that our customers have come to love.”
I'm incredibly excited by this news, however, the only question the six-year-old in my head is asking is this: will the Transformers transform? Sadly, I doubt it, but if I can own and paint an awesome Optimus Prime miniature, I'm sure I'll be happy nevertheless.
All your favourite characters will begin to appear later this year in both pre-painted and unpainted formats, with My Little Pony and Transformers products first available throughout North America.
What character are you most excited to see released under this new licence?
"Bringing family classics G.I. Joe, My Little Pony, and Transformers to the tabletop!"
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Well this is interesting. Hopefully this will give Hasbro courage to bring back G.I. Joe beyond just collector’s club figures aimed at collectors to help bring in new fans for that long lived franchise.
Agree but the movies flopped and set them back. They need a toy line and a quality program to make it work. Marvel needs to get the brand back to what it was under Larry.
The frustrating thing about that is how Retribution showed they understood what Rise of Cobra got wrong and did a good job course-correcting. Hells, it even made me wish they hadn’t killed of Duke as Channing Tatum and The Rock is a pairing I never knew I wanted in my movies….
IIRC Retribution was also hindered by timing since it was originally meant to be released same summer as Marvel’s Avengers but was postponed to summer after that while toys were already in stores. I have heard talk about movie that is supposed to be around fan favorite (as well as Larry Hama’s favorite) character Snake-Eyes.
Them killing of Duke in Retribution is interesting if you think that they were supposed to do that in animated movie but they chose not to do it after backlash over Optimus Prime’s death in animated 1986 Transformers movie.
You know I had forgotten about that SNAFU with the films getting pushed back and the toys coming out a year early as a result. And yeah, there was some news a few weeks ago that Ray Park is out and another actor/martial artist has been hired for the role. A shame as Park can still go. Yeah, the classic Joe movie is pretty hilarious for how they hand wave Dukes spectacularly fatal-looking gaping chest wound with “He’s gone into a coma” then at the end the whole “Duke’s woken up” line. In all fairness though that film is pretty… Read more »
Read this the other day, and was surprised at all the new things WizKids is dabbling their fingers into. Good on them, and for us I think.
I thought I read something about them getting the rights for the Orville as well (love that show) Crazy times.
I reckon Transformers could be a good IP for a miniatures game.
As would GIJoe – if done right they could cross them over and you could have things like Autobots vs Cobra.
Both of them have had some crossovers in comic books (both Marvel and IDW runs) with things like G.I. Joe killing Bumblebee who then come back as Goldbug and Cobra repairing Megatron and giving him his G2 look and tank mode so it does make sense. But history of both is also tied together.
I remember G.I.Joe involved in the double Megatron saga in the UK Marvel comics, but i didn’t remember that they were the ones who killed Bumblebee. Kudos.
I’m interested about the Transformers minis.
Hmm, guess it’s time to build a Cobra army.
good times for fans.
Any idea which series of Transformers they’ll do?
Unicron. True scale. 32mm.
Knowing Hasbro and way things are done with TFTCG I would bet on G1 inspired Generations ones that are very IDW.
Do you have a link to an illustration of such a thing?
Sadly I didn’t find any single image that I could had linked that would have had only that image but here is link that offers lot of examples: https://vectorsigma.info/wave-2-spoilers
Those are also brand new art work unlike ones from TFTCG Wave 1 that were taken from other sources like mobile game and IDW comic books.
Appreciated. I look forward to seeing what they do.