Artbox DH Sets to be US Only?

[Guest]

[Scifi Cards]

Darren of Factory Entertainment (and formerly of Cards, Inc) brought this bit of information home from San Diego Comic Con:

FYI it is my understanding that Artbox has the rights for the last two movies for hobby only and for the USA only. Panini has been awarded same for rest of the world and USA retail. It may mean two different sets of product. But the Artbox one will be the one with the autos and costumes. It will certainly mean a supply of grey market product coming into europe and healthy ebay sales for dealers in the usa.

Panini will release retail product for the rest of the world which will be mostly stickers for most territories but im sure some territories will have cards.

And the Followup...

Panini will not produce hobby product. they will if they do anything just do retail cards.

and it has nothing to do with Artbox, its a licensing decision by Warners. And before the next statement is posted about do they not understand the collector etc etc etc etc.

Panini will sell more in Belgium on a retail set than Artbox will sell in their entire run, so they certainly know what it means.

either way i am sure they will presume that with the power of the internet the collectors will ''find'' the product.

As for any iteration sets, i do not know, i would presume it is only reflected for the final two movies

Now this is not much more than a rumor at this point, but Darren does have his sources and isn't prone to posting news that isn't true  And this isn't the sort of information that Artbox will be making a press release about.

But it's a very interesting development to be sure.

Ed

[kbmum]

WB has stopped awarding trading card licenses for other properties, so perhaps this development is tied into that.  I don't know what this all means for Artbox.  I guess it depends on how much money it made from retail releases and whether WB will allow the company to keep the HP hobby license and make retrospective sets after Deathly Hallows Part 2 is done.

Darren may or may not be prone to posting news that's true, but he is prone to posting news before a manufacturer is ready to release the info (i.e. Rittenhouse getting the LOST license).  Someone reported that Artbox lost the 24 license.  If both bits of info are true, things may not be going well at all for Artbox.

[Scifi Cards]

Indeed, Darren has been known to enjoy being the first to post news.  But, he's not often wrong either.

Artbox really needs some new blood in their licenses.  Not sure what I would suggest for them.  I would have thought them a good candidate for Twilight but the license went to NECA, who makes the Twilight toys.

But I wish them the best because when it's all said and done they make very nice cards.

Ed

[kbmum]

Artbox definitely needs more licenses.  When you see what Breygent has done (Dexter and Ghost Whisperer) as one of the newer companies in the industry, it's kind of surprising that Artbox can't do more, especially since it's part of a much larger Japanese corporation.  Do you know whether Artbox appointed a vice president after Mike left?  I get the feeling that very few people work in the U.S. office -- Kay could very well be the only employee.

[allender]

I wonder whether Artbox (as a company) is all that worried about hobby licenses. Absolutely, the Potter franchise has been very successful. But how much share did they have in the market before POA? Mostly they focused on specialized products of seemingly smaller impact, not covered by the regular hobby licenses, like filmcardz, holochrome, gaming, and sticker-cards.

The popularity of 24 is waning. Hobby cards may be such a small part of their corporate sales that they only will pursue licenses that appear to be as great a bargain as HP and 24 seemed to them, in retrospect. I'd hate to see it, because I think they've done a great job of bringing themselves into the top tier of Hobby-card presence, production, and support. But they never seemed to been the type that competed for dozens of licenses with the hope that half of them would be hits.

Darren had a great point that Panini could expect higher sales for an HP Retail release in Belgium alone than Artbox sees worldwide for a Hobby release. I wonder how the Artbox Hobby sales compare to other sales the parent company has in Japan alone.

I'm not sure that Panini hasn't already been earning more from HP stickers than Artbox has from the cards. And probably there is an opening in the U.S. Retail market, if they can find proper distribution. The Naruto sets they produced with Inkworks as a partner were well done, but I'm not sure they fully found the target audience.