1. Is the plain Stormtrooper likely the 3.75 line's best seller, in terms of volume of units produced, rereleased, and sold over and over? I'm talking Kenner through Hasbro figures combined.
-- Derek

I don't doubt that Stormtroopers are the figures that open box collectors tend to have the most of, but odds are Darth Vader is the best-selling character in most - if not nearly all - lines since the beginning.

This sort of information is probably unknowable at this point in history, unless someone at Lucasfilm has an archive of every single SKU from the past 47 years with global sales data. My hunch is "no," mostly because there were many periods of time where it was a little hard to get a Stormtrooper. There were eras where Darth Vaders shipped two per box in multiple waves, and they kept pumping out more, and they just kept selling.

I assume we all have different definitions of "plain stormtrooper" - figures with battle damage deco or dirt probably do count, Sandtroopers or game-specific colorways do not - but even that is going to require a lot of squinting to figure out. Clone Troopers, if you're including all Clone Troopers, are probably the character(s) with the most variety and potentially some pretty big sales numbers because of that variety. Are they one guy? Or different guys? That's the big question, and I'll leave it to the philosophers. But odds are Hasbro has sold as many if not significantly more Clones than Stormtroopers. There are over 300 Clone Troopers... how many more, I don't know, I stopped counting.

Given casepacks I assume someone like Darth Vader - plain, whatever that means - probably is the best seller of the modern era (1995-present) and when it comes to the original era... I honestly don't know.

What I know - or think I know - is that POTF2-era figures allegedly maxxed out in the sales of 200,000-250,000 units. But we have written books with researched data that say many of the original Star Wars figures from Kenner, especially for the first film, had over a million units per character for just their first year of production alone. Given many of those figures were sold worldwide from 1978 to the late 1980s in Brazil... that's a lot of figures.

The Classic 4-pack (the Kenner-style reissues in a 1995 POTF2 box) were supposedly made in that 200,000-250,000 range. If true, it's possible that 1978-style Darth Vader could be one of the biggest sellers of all time... and that's before you factor in his modern era designs.

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, bad guys were popular - but they got a lot more popular as those kids grew up. It's possible we might find out Chewbacca or R2-D2 or Yoda sold a surprisingly large amount of units, or that massive quantities of Boba Fett or The Emperor were made for mail-in offers that resulted in huge edition sizes.

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2. Given we are in May 2025 [question sent 5/5 - AP], and you mentioned toys can take up to 2 years from development to "on-shelf" is it a safe bet that Hasbro has the line for the Mando/Grogu movie locked down and is pushing ahead with the 2027 release of "Star Wars: Starfighter". In today's world, how would Hasbro know what to produce, how much to produce and the costs involved?
--Jeremiah

Hasbro is making a new movie toy line with the most challenging headwinds any Star Wars has ever experienced, so I'll be cutting them some slack. I would say no launch in the past seven years has been particularly momentous, so that's probably the best thing to keep in mind when we go forward. No Marvel movie made a massive splash in the toy aisle. No Transformers movie offered a big variety. The last Star Wars movie had to share the spotlight with a TV show and a video game. Oh, and next time they're probably going to be sharing a spotlight with the Darth Maul cartoon.

If anyone knew the right number of toys to make, and order, we'd all be rich in this business! There are two things to keep in mind: for kids, you have to know how many toys to make without any pre-orders. It's a guess, with some input from forecasting, that you pray you get right. For collectors, you can open it to pre-orders - but the windows tend to be small enough between pre-order and delivery that you can't always right-size the run. And you certainly can't take customer demand into account when making a new top-secret movie line, you just have to pick a quantity and hope it sells.

And that's in a good year! There's no magic to guess exactly what America wants to buy.

My expectation is for the toy offering to be on par with The Rise of Skywalker. Hasbro has got to be working on The Mandalorian & Grogu now. I don't think anyone will be angry by me doing math saying "the movie is due out May 2026" and "the movie has been filming for a while" and "the toys must be in development now if anything is going to hit store shelves in 12 months." What's worth keeping in mind is that these items were most likely in the works since at least last October or November, but they were developed when we didn't know who would be in the Oval Office yet, and only one of the two candidates were floating up to 60% tariffs. I don't expect that any toy manufacturer developed these items with that in mind - and it is probably too late to change parameters of the line now. What you see next year - most likely - will have been developed pre-tariff, with zero concept of what the toy market wants with the levels of economic "The Scream" we're experiencing today. In Hasbro's shoes I'd probably do a smaller line - maybe delaying a few items until "later" to mitigate risk and stale inventory. Certainly, we've had no big brand statements on an aisle for years.

With Starfighter, I would anticipate Hasbro to start developing around Halloween 2025. The movie hasn't been shot and I believe it is being shot overseas. This could result in a change of locations and maybe even delay the movie, given current comments about the film industry being trotted out and/or walked back. But, this movie won't have the benefit of any wisdom The Mandalorian and Grogu might grant - it'll be kind of like The Force Awakens and Rogue One. Both are overlapping development and probably will be similar. So if you like one, odds are the next one will be a similar, smaller roll-out. A key difference is that whatever trade issues could be normalized in time for Hasbro to make a better guess at what the market might still want to buy. "Will we get starfighter vehicle toys for Starfighter?" is my big question. My guess is the answer is "yes, one."

I would assume Hasbro will tighten up quantities as long as it pleases the shareholders. It's extraordinarily difficult to predict what the right quantity of a toy is, particularly as Star Wars' variety gets downsized. Recent movies with Hasbro toy brands have tended to have excess stock. Goodness knows I've seen Transformers: Rise of the Beasts and Transformers One markdowns. We've seen streaming toys like The Acolyte figures & lightsabers at Ross, along with Ahsoka, The Book of Boba Fett and Andor. And these were things people liked. Heck, I saw another The Book of Boba Fett Retro Kennery Dune Sea Boba at Ross on Wednesday. (Yes I bought it.)

We probably won't see a Midnight Madness again in our lifetimes. That was probably a fluke thanks to pent-up interest which hasn't been allowed to replenish itself.

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FIN

With the return of new Kenner figures, I certainly feel stuck in a nostalgia loop. Not necessarily just for Kenner-style product, but for the old, big launches. Jeremiah brought up the new movies and I assume we're not going to get the kind of plastic feeding frenzy we deserve next year. I think Disney's increasingly spoiler-averse culture is going to cost them a few sales, mostly because we as fans will buy anything before seeing the movie. I have and love a Sarco Plank action figure, which serves no narrative purpose, but is freaking cool. Gasgano is basically nobody, but I got to play with him before seeing the movie. A little imagination goes a long way to making a toy seem bigger and better than its on-screen counterpart, and hopefully Hsabro will pump out a few cool nobodies for us with each movie. We'll probably see more about The Mandalorian and Grogu at Toy Fair 2026, or if someone leaks it sooner.

The last few movies have made me feel that the world of Disney consumer products has shifted from "sell a few people a ton of toys" to "sell a ton of people a few toys." We're generally seeing narrower (and simpler) offerings, with more trooper and droid repaints instead of original characters from games. I assume we might even get recycled figures for the new movie - which may make a lot of sense, but I'd like to live in a world where Hasbro makes a Sigourney Weaver Star Wars Kenner-style figure. Wouldn't you?

Reports around the web show a lot more people finding the Target The Retro Collection 6-pack. I've opened 4 of the 6 so far and I'm convinced it's probably the best thing we'll get this year, mostly because it builds on a good collection and isn't overwhelming. Dr. Evazan has a bonus blaster if your Walrus Man lost his, which is brilliant and something I'd like to see Hasbro do with the next set(s). There are so many weaponless orignals, having a more-accurate-to-the-movie replacement won't hurt the value of the authentic Kenner toy and may make people feel better about giving incomplete figures a home.

Walrus Man himself is a perfectly good remake. The eyes are nice, the paint is sharp, and the sculpted details are soft. It feels good - if you only know the figure from pictures, I think you'll love it - but the whisker detail on the head is largely washed out. It has the vibes down pat, though, and this is a line that's all about vibes.

Han Solo Stormtrooper is not a little short - he's quite tall compared to a Basic Stormtrooper or Sandtrooper. The extra blaster is, again, inspired - a great extra for Chewbacca or something you can give your Stormtroopers or Sandtroopers. If Hasbro sold him individually, I bet they'd sell tens of thousands to people stealing his helmet for Luke, or borrowing his blasters for other figures. If Hasbro ever sold these individually again, I think they'd find them to be incredibly hot sellers if they included 2-3 newly-tooled weapons that weren't available under Kenner that could be "borrowed" by other old figures.

I also opened the Sandtrooper. The head on mine doesn't really turn much, but it's charming. If you asked me to imagine what Kenner would have made, this is better. He has a new blaster. The elbow on the left arm is bent, so he can hold a rifle over his shoulder. Both of his hands can grip a blaster, while the original Stormtrooper struggled to do this. The only downside? He's a chonker - the big backpack means he's too big to fit in some of my old Kenner vehicles.

I'm slowly opening the set because I don't know when - or if - we'll get another one. Every time we get one of these sets, I don't know if it's the last one. I feel The Black Series will never end, and The Vintage Collection will always be going. But Retro could probably vanish and its particular audience - vocal, but not as much as younger fans of the other line - might just shrug and move on. It's hard to build a community and keep people engaged with a whopping 4 new things to buy between 2024 and 2025.

--Adam Pawlus

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