Despite being shown a much wider variety of characters, including the entire company of dwarfs this year at Toy Fair, The Bridge Direct took to their official Facebook page to re-emphasize to fans that what is out in stores now is all we will see for 2013 from their “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug” toy line.  No dragons, no complete line-up of dwarfs, no “Epic Journey” multi-pack.   Just the 3 “new” 6″ figures (one we got at SDCC) and the 5-pack full of elves.

This is the statement they posted this week:

We know many fans would like to see a wider range of characters offered for DOS, however this is the complete line for this film. We are huge fans of LOTR and Hobbit, and would like nothing more than to release figures of every character, but there are many factors that determine how many we can effectively produce. For example, retailers have specific dates when new product goes into stores. To meet those dates, our development process starts 18 months before figures are in stores. This provides time for sculpting, painting, revisions, studio approval, manufacturing time, shipping, etc. Therefore, if character appearance is not finalized that far in advance (particularly for digitally generated/animated characters), we cannot make them in time for retail launch. There is also the matter of minimum order quantities in manufacturing: we have to make 10s of thousands of pieces of each character! So if we include 10 characters in the 6″ figure assortment, that’s over 100k pieces of product, minimum. If our retailers can’t commit to buying that many pieces, we have to cut down the number of characters in the assortment to make the order quantity viable. It was always our goal to offer the widest variety of characters possible in both scales, within the parameters of how much our retailers can sell. Based on sales of product from Unexpected Journey, we found that there was a larger market for the 6″ figures and therefore have been able to offer more characters in that scale. We know the Tolkien fan base is passionate and appreciate their continued interest in our line. We also hope that the fans can appreciate our passion and commitment to quality, as well as the conditions that make it impossible to offer every character in every scale. Looking forward to the film and a successful sell-through of the figures at retail so we can offer more cool stuff for part 3!

The complete line of figures available for DOS in 2013.