The Death of the Toy Industry

By Real Life Fake Wizard

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Imagine a Saturday afternoon in 2026. You just saw the Super Mario Galaxy movie. As you walk out of the theater, you think, "What kind of fun stuff is there to go buy in the toy store?" "Oh, well, the toy stores don’t exist anymore. There’s Target and Walmart, but all the toys they have now are really expensive and terribly cheap in quality. And then it dawns on you that the only toys today that really exist as movie tie-ins are $50 popcorn buckets. And that kid over there got the last Yoshi. You get home and check online. It’s sold out everywhere. And on eBay it’s reselling for $95. You weren’t even going to put popcorn in it. That is the entire movie merchandise industry now, reduced to popcorn buckets. How did a forty-year, multi-billion-dollar machine get reduced to scalpable popcorn buckets? The answer is a sequence of corporate decisions, technological disruptions, and demographic shifts that each compounded the last until the whole structure caved in. The popcorn buckets exist