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When Hot Toys launched pre-orders in the summer for their 14” Venompool sixth scale figure for a bit over $400, I thought that would turn out to be one of the wildest solicitations of the year. I mean, 400 bucks for a virtually unknown mobile game mash-up character? Crazy talk. But Marvel newcomer Pop Culture Shock Collectibles is upping the ante in a mind-exploding away: the 40” PCS Venompool 1:3 scale statue goes up for order this afternoon… for $2500! (Yes, you read that right.) Yowza. Let’s have a look…
For those who don’t know him (which was the vast majority of Marvel collectors until Hot Toys unveiled their own at SDCC 2019), Venompool is an amalgamation of Venom and Deadpool from the Contest of Champions video game. I’d be lying if I said I played that game myself, but I have heard quite a few fans say that they play and enjoy it.
But are there enough hardcore (and I mean hardcore) Contest of Champions fanatics out there with cavern-deep pocketbooks for PopCultureShock to effectively sell a quantity of $2500 statues from the game large enough to facilitate actually turning a profit…?
I see two major limiting factors to this Venompool statue selling well, and those factors may be incontrovertible. First up is a twenty-five hundred dollar price-tag. Sideshow was only able to sell 400 of their exclusive Juggernaut statues for $1400, and that was for perhaps the single most-demanded X-Men villain in 1:4 scale.
The idea that PCS Toys will somehow be able to sell anywhere even close to that many units of a Z-List character that costs close to double what the Juggernaut did seems, well… kind of farcical.
But furthermore, this piece is also a space-sucker like virtually no other before it. This behemoth is a mammoth 40” high by 30” wide by 28.5” deep. An IKEA Besta, Stuva or even the mighty Pax won’t be nearly deep enough to display this beast on, and a detolf shatters even thinking about having Venompool on top. This GamerVerse statue just is not practical display-wise as no common display shelving can contain it.
But now that I’ve talked about the primary reasons I think this piece won’t sell well—I want to chat about the reasons it’s a beautiful piece nonetheless. (Well, maybe “beautiful” is the wrong word—but at least “masterful”.)
Just like PCS’s GamerVerse Spider-Man PS4 statue that went up for order in October, there’s absolutely no challenging that this Venompool is an incredibly well-executed, gorgeous statue. The texturing is spectacular, and the size makes this a centerpiece like no other (for collectors who have the space to put it somewhere).
Both head sculpts for this statue are winners, with the psychotic grinning portrait getting the nod over the creepy tongue-out open-mouthed portrait for me. The paint work on the teeth and tongue are definitely standout work, though.
While it might have been neat to see a Hulk-sized, symbiotic-wearing Deadpool dual-wielding katanas, I think the powerful pose with claws out and ready to eviscerate was the right choice for the design here. This looks deadly, whereas Venompool wielding swords might have given the figure a more comical feel.
I’m pretty much over destroyed Sentinel bases at this point, but as far as they go, this is a very nice one. And because the Sentinel head base is so humongous, there’s room on it for a future 1:3 Deadpool statue that PopCultureShock presumably has in the works.
And I think Pop Culture Shock Collectibles is really to be commended on the significant amount of daring it took to make something like this as their second resin Marvel statue—this is a company with some serious cojones. This isn’t a character I’m interested in, and it’s not a size or price that’s right for me—but I am definitely interested in seeing what PCS Collectibles comes up with for future projects.
The Venompool PCS resin statue goes up for order this afternoon, and is scheduled to be released in Q1 2021. The official distributor for the piece is Sideshow Collectibles. I would have laughed at the idea of PCS getting a major statue produced and released in barely over a year not that long ago, but they have really upped their production speed game lately and I believe they can do it now. Whether or not they actually get enough orders to produce this $2500 statue at all, I feel less certain of.
Sound odd, Marvel collectors! Is anybody out there planning on picking up one of the most expensive and gargantuan Marvel statues solicited this year? Do you think this two-and-a-half grand resin Venompool statue has what it takes to be a hit for PCS, or am I correct to be highly skeptical of the viability of this latest item from them?