Voltron Just Got a New Pilot: Inside Hasbro’s Bid to Reshape the Combining Robot Toy Aisle

Hasbro has signed on with Amazon MGM Studios to build the toy line for the coming live action Voltron film, and the deal could rewrite who gets to own the combining robot category.

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• The Announcement
• A Franchise Built on a Japanese Robot
• Where Bandai Still Sets the Bar
• What Hasbro Actually Brings to a Combiner
• The Wish List
• What This Does to the Wider Market

On February 4, 2026, Hasbro confirmed a new licensing partnership with Amazon MGM Studios to build action figures, toys, and roleplay products tied to the studio’s upcoming live action Voltron movie. The Pawtucket, Rhode Island company positioned the deal as a chance to bring its decades of experience on legacy franchises into the Voltron universe, with the resulting products built directly around the film rather than the older cartoon continuity.

Tim Kilpin, Hasbro’s president of toy, licensing, and entertainment, framed the deal as a natural extension of the company’s existing library, noting that Voltron’s decades long history fits comfortably alongside the other 80s era brands Hasbro already manages, and that the studio partnership should extend the franchise’s relevance for both longtime fans and a newer audience discovering it for the first time.

The film itself has been gathering momentum for over a year. It comes from director Rawson Marshall Thurber, who also wrote the story, with a screenplay credited to Ellen Shanman alongside Thurber. The cast lines up Henry Cavill, Sterling K. Brown, Alba Baptista, and Rita Ora, and production wrapped in Australia last year, though a release date has not been set. Hasbro used the announcement to lead into its 2026 presence at Toy Fair in New York, where the Voltron news sat alongside other major reveals for the year.

None of this happened in a vacuum. Hasbro has spent the first months of 2026 stacking up film adjacent licenses at a pace that outstrips its usual rhythm, having also locked in the toy rights to the upcoming Street Fighter movie from Legendary Entertainment days earlier, and a multi year Harry Potter partnership with Warner Bros. Discovery Global Consumer Products the following week. Voltron now sits in that same lane: a legacy property getting a theatrical reboot, with Hasbro positioned as the physical product arm from day one rather than arriving after the fact.

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It is worth remembering what Voltron actually is before getting into who makes the toys. The American Voltron franchise began as a repackaging of a Japanese anime series, GoLion, produced by Toei Company in the early 1980s. World Events Productions licensed the footage and characters for Western television, and the toy line that followed built its entire identity around one mechanical trick: five robotic lions that separate for solo play and click together into a single towering warrior.

That combining gimmick is the reason Voltron has never fully left the collector conversation, even during the decades when the cartoon itself was off the air. It is also why any new toy line, Hasbro’s included, gets measured against a very specific bar: does the thing actually come apart and go back together the way the show promised.

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For serious collectors, that bar has a name attached to it. Bandai’s Soul of Chogokin line, sold globally through its Tamashii Nations brand, has spent nearly a decade treating Voltron as one of its flagship releases. The GX-71 figure, first issued in 2016 and reissued multiple times since, including a 2024 fiftieth anniversary Chogokin edition, stands roughly 270 millimeters tall and is built from die cast metal and ABS plastic rather than the hollow polystyrene common to mass market toys.

The appeal is specific and a little nerdy in the best way. The figure separates cleanly into its five components, the Red Lion, Green Lion, Blue Lion, Yellow Lion, and Black Lion, and comes packed with an oversized signature sword plus a rotating set of smaller weapons for individual lion play. Collector forums have spent years comparing it favorably against earlier attempts from other manufacturers, with more than one longtime buyer describing it as the version that finally made older combining Voltron toys feel outdated by comparison.

That is the premium end of the market, priced and engineered for adults who grew up with the cartoon and want something that looks right on a shelf. It has never been designed to compete on price, and it was never meant to be an impulse buy at a big box retailer. That gap, between shelf worthy die cast and something a parent grabs off an endcap, is exactly where Hasbro tends to operate.

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Hasbro’s case for entering this category rests on a track record rather than a fresh idea. The company has run Transformers for four decades, a franchise built on the same underlying promise as Voltron: individual vehicles or figures that snap into a single larger robot. Its Combiner Force and multi step changer lines have already show a gen of kids on exactly the kind of assembly logic Voltron toys require, just with a different cast of characters.

What Hasbro adds that Bandai’s premium line does not chase is reach. Mass retail distribution, a marketing budget tied to a theatrical release, and a pricing structure aimed at families rather than adult collectors are the whole point of a Hasbro license. Add lights, sound modules, and simplified but sturdy transformation joints built for repeated handling by kids, and the pitch becomes clear: this is not a rival to Chogokin, it is a different audience entirely.

There is also a decent chance the finished toys end up blending traditions rather than picking one. Hasbro has a long history of working alongside Japanese manufacturing partners, most notably Takara Tomy on the Transformers line, and Voltron’s own roots as a Toei production make some degree of stylistic crossover likely. A Hasbro Voltron figure with the sculpting instincts of a Japanese combining robot but the shelf price of an American action figure line would not be a strange outcome. It would be the expected one.

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Ask anyone who has followed Voltron toys for years what they actually want from a new Hasbro line, and the list tends to be short and specific rather than aspirational. A five lion combiner set that forms Voltron with real stability, not one that leans or wobbles under its own weight, sits at the top. Individual lion vehicles that transform cleanly on their own, without requiring the full team to function as standalone toys, come next.

Beyond that, the requests get more granular: a proper Blazing Sword accessory scaled to match, and at least one mid tier Deluxe or Ultimate release with electronics, since Voltron’s animated appeal has always leaned on sound and light as much as articulation. None of this is exotic. It mirrors what Hasbro has already built for Transformers, just pointed at a different five piece cast.

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The honest read here is that this is good news with very little downside for people who actually collect this stuff. Bandai’s Chogokin line is not going anywhere, and nothing about a Hasbro license changes what that figure is built for or who buys it. What changes is the floor. Families who would never spend collector money on a die cast import now get an entry point built for kids, priced for impulse purchase, and backed by a theatrical release with real marketing weight behind it.

That kind of split, premium collector product at the top, accessible mass market product at the base, is exactly how Transformers has sustained itself for forty years without either tier undercutting the other. If Hasbro executes anywhere near that standard, the combining robot category as a whole gets bigger rather than more crowded, and Voltron ends up with more relevance across more age groups than it has had since the original run left television.