Toys: Please Stop Spoiling Movies Before They Come Out

This article contains minor SPOILERS for Thor: Love and Thunder and legit SPOILERS for Ghostbusters: Afterlife.

While we still have yet to see a trailer, a teaser, or even an embarrassing series of promotional NFTs for the upcoming Thor: Love and Thunder, we are now getting images of the movie’s toy line. Yup, images have surfaced online depicting action figures for Thor and Jane Foster, who becomes The Mighty Thor in the film and wields a “re-constructed Mjolnir” – Mjolnir being Thor’s hammer, not a line of IKEA bookshelves. It would have been nice to see it in the movie first, but here are the tiny plastic approximations, at any rate:

While these photos seemingly haven’t been released officially, presumably, the details of the toyline will be made public long before the movie comes out, which has increasingly become something of a problem for blockbusters these days. Sure, trailers often give much of the plot away, but toys have been straight-up blowing crucial plot details months early. 

Like how the Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness figures revealed characters we didn’t even know were in the movie and Avengers: Endgame advertised figures of characters who were ostensibly supposed to be dead. Not to mention that the recent Ghostbusters: Afterlife released a toy version of the late Harold Ramis whose ghostly CGI approximation shows up at the end of the movie. In toy form, though, he looks more like a frozen corpse recovered from Mt. Everest. 

And this issue has existed for a long time; back in the ‘90s, toymakers seemed positively insistent on blowing twist endings where the hero’s love interest turned out to be a villain, like how The Blank in Dick Tracy was really Madonna.

Or how the mysterious Phantasm in Batman: The Mask of the Phantasm was really Bruce Wayne’s ex-girlfriend, Andrea.

Obviously, toy companies are going to continue pumping out movie-related merch, but surely they can keep some key details under wraps for those of us who don’t want movies spoiled and enjoy playing with action figures despite being literal adults. 

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Top Image: Marvel Studios/Sony