We all hate when costs go up, especially when they go up in our favorite hobbies. And in the last five years, the costs of action figures have gone up nearly 50%. But why is that? I’ve been doing a lot of reading and research, so I have a piece of the answer.
First off, the average, six-inch action figure in 2023 is the most complex that they have ever been. When action figures took off in popularity in the 80s and 90s, the average “good” action figure was made of about 5-10 pieces: a head, the front and back of the torso, two arms, two legs, and sometimes those arms and legs had separate upper and lower pieces to allow for bends at the elbows and knees. A REALLY fancy figure would also have a separate lower torso with a swivel at the waist, which was made of a front and back piece. There were exceptions, but I’m speaking to the average figure over two decades.
In 2024, the average figure has a head, often a separate hair piece, a neck, usually a ball socket piece connecting the head and neck, the front and back of the upper torso, the front and back of the abdominal area of the torso, the front and back of the waist/lower torso, two shoulders, two biceps, two elbows with two pins each, two forearms, two hands with a separate wrist pin, two hips, two thighs, two knees with two pins each, two calfs, two boots, two feet, and usually separate ankle pins. And that doesn’t even count the accessories, such as weapons, energy effects, or alternate heads or hands! Action figures now have twice as many pieces in just the legs than 90s toys had in total. And each one of those pieces comes at an additional cost.
Additionally, nearly everything now is a six-inch or 1:12-scale action figure. Previously, toy scales were all over the place, but usually somewhere between 3.75″ or 5-inch. That means each figure uses more plastic, because they need to be bigger. The cost of the crude oils that make up plastics — The same crude oils used to make gasoline, incidentally — has gone up exponentially since 9/11/2001. And thanks to the way the supply chains broke down during 2020 and the shipping companies significantly raised their rates, it’s literally more expensive to ship things from the factories in China all around the world than it was previous to COVID.
2020s action figures have incredible paint applications compared to the past, but each swipe with a paint brush costs a few cents per figure. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but 5 cents multiplied by, for example, 10,000 figures (I don’t know what average production numbers are, I’m just pulling out a number for easy math) is $500 per pupil across the production of one figure in an assortment. Add in the iris, the white of the eye, lips, hair highlights, etc., etc., it’s thousands of dollars worth of paint to produce just the heads of a run of standard action figures in the 2020s.
And then, all the licensors keep raising costs on how much they’re charging toy manufacturers to be ALLOWED to make toys based on their properties, and the toy companies have to keep spending that money before they can even get started on production. You want a Batman figure? Cool, Batman is owned by DC Comics, who is owned by Warner Bros-Discovery, and they aren’t licensing anything for free. You want to make a Star Wars figure? You’d better be ready to pay Disney millions of dollars for the right to do so.
And the toy companies can’t operate at a zero-profit level. They have to make their money back, AND THEN MORE, in order to pay all the employees who work on these toys, the artists and designers who work on the packages, the marketing teams, rent for their offices, the technology and supplies that making toys requires, etc., etc., etc., down the line. Additionally, the retail stores need to make money! Wal-Mart and Target aren’t going to carry anything that isn’t profitable.
The other HUGE issue is that Bain Capital Partners bought, stripped, and bankrupted both Kay-Bee Toys and Toys “R” Us. Yes, the same company did that to BOTH of the major toy retailers in North America. That’s THOUSANDS of toy-specific retailers that are no longer in business, which means production numbers for each toy HAVE to be reduced. Yes, there’s online retailers now, but even combined they don’t make up for the loss of the nearly 3,000 combined KB and TRU stores. And the way production factories work is the more units that get ordered, the cost per unit reduces. With significantly fewer retail outlets, the two biggest toy distributors in North America are now Target and Wal-Mart. And they don’t have huge toy sections, which means fewer units of each toy are produced. And since the factories provide discounts based on volume, fewer units being produced means each figure actually costs more to produce.
In 2018, the United States government increased the tariffs (trade taxes) on various imported goods from around the world. Many countries responded by increasing tariffs on American imports. While toys specifically weren’t affected, the metals and other components used in the factories that produce toys WERE affected. Basically, it’s just more expensive for things to be shipped in and out of the USA. Well, most action figures are produced in Chinese factories. So, manufacturers are now having consumers eat the costs of those tariffs.
Companies are doing what they can to keep costs down, usually in terms of recycling parts. It used to be that nearly every toy was its own unique sculpt, unless there was something like the Ninja Turtles where it made sense to reuse the torso four times over. But today? You ever notice that there’s really only a handful of Marvel Legends figures, just with new paint, accessories, and heads? Or that a bunch of toys in GI Joe Classified has the same pants? Or that the WWE wrestlers share the same handful of bodies? That’s because it’s cheaper to produce a few molds and recycle all those parts as much as possible than it is to create a new mold for every single figure. That’s why a lot of the collector-targeted toys are even more expensive than most offerings from Hasbro and Mattel; A lot of times, each collector-focused figure is totally unique, and all of those molds cost money, even if they only have a handful of parts.
And then there’s the shareholders. Publicly-traded companies like Hasbro (NASDAQ: HAS) and Mattel (NASDAQ: MAT) have people that have invested significant money into these companies, and want to see those investments grow. As such, they expect stock growth every fiscal quarter. And what’s one way to make more money? CHARGE more money.
And then there’s the logistical stuff — Freight costs to get the toys from China to whatever country they’re being sold. Gasoline costs for the trucks that deliver them to the stores. Retailers take a cut of all sales, because THEY need to stay in business and pay their employees. Maybe there’s a distributor between the manufacturer and the retailer, as there are in lots of industries. Everyone gets a piece of each of those sales.
So, yeah. I do wish action figures were cheaper. I wish I could still ride my bicycle up to the Kay-Bee Toys at the mall and get four or five figures for $25 instead of just one. I wish the collector’s market didn’t basically demand that each toy have 30+ pieces, countless paint applications, outrageous licensing costs, or any of the other issues I’ve outlined above.
Unfortunately, the business behind manufacturing toys just sort of forces that they cost what they do.