Hot Toys

Hot Toys was founded in 2000 by Howard Chan, a former television screenwriter who had spent the late nineties running a small action-figure shop called Cool Toys in Causeway Bay. Chan has said he invested his life savings in the first release and slept in the factory for three days to make sure a walkie-talkie accessory's wire was hand-coiled correctly. Twenty-five years and roughly eight hundred Movie Masterpiece releases later, that is still the most Hot Toys sentence ever spoken.

The beginning was stranger than the empire. Before any licenses came the "Famous Type" figures: an unofficial Ethan Hunt, an unofficial Neo, and, wonderfully, an unofficial George Lucas in a plaid shirt. The first official release was a U.S. Air Force F-14 pilot marketed as "Jack Carter," which fooled precisely nobody about which film it was homaging. For its first half-decade the company built military and special-forces figures, an education in gear, fabric, and layered realism that became the brand's DNA.

The pivot came in late 2005 with the Movie Masterpiece Series. MMS01 was Kyle Reese from The Terminator, a fittingly humble start for the line that would define the hobby. Chan has described how hard those early licenses were to win, with studio agents asking what action figures even were. The 2006 TrueType body gave the line a standardized, poseable foundation, and MMS13, the Batman Begins Batman, opened the superhero era.

Then came Iron Man. The Mark III, developed alongside the 2008 film, arrived with openable armor flaps and light-up eyes and repulsors, and it changed the market overnight. The Marvel partnership that began there carried Hot Toys from respected Hong Kong maker to global standard: hundreds of Marvel figures since, alongside Star Wars, DC, Terminator, Predator, and nearly every blockbuster property collectors could ask for.

The craft has names attached. JC Hong, the company's Korea-based chief painter, is the reason Hot Toys portraits look back at you, and chief sculptor Yulli has shaped many of the faces themselves. Signature engineering keeps arriving in waves: the DX line launched in 2009 with the Heath Ledger Joker and its PERS rolling-eye system, and the diecast era began in 2013 with Iron Man 3's Iron Patriot.

Hot Toys is also a place. The Secret Base flagship in Mong Kok, the annual Ani-Com summer exclusives in Hong Kong, the Sideshow partnership that has carried the brand to Western collectors since 2005: all part of the ritual. So are the wait times, which collectors describe with a mixture of despair and Stockholm syndrome. Announcement to delivery routinely runs two years. The figures, infuriatingly, keep being worth it.

For most collectors, the Archive included, Hot Toys is the reference point everything else is measured against. Grails like the DX11 Joker and the battle-damaged Mark VI are the hobby's shared vocabulary, and a sixth-scale collection without at least one MMS number in it is a rare thing indeed.