Nurul: I can almost guarantee that his license from the movie studio will not cover international distribution. They rarely do, and when they do they cost that much more.
Bamabenz, I'm forced to agree with you. But the problem is partially one of their own making. Albino Dragon held an open contest to find the artist rather than using an established one. They're taking on all these IP licenses but they lack enough artists to see it through, it would appear. The "cartoony" approach isn't one I would have taken on any of the decks they've made as licensed properties - I cringed a little when I saw it appear on one of the "Princess Bride" decks.
If you're making a deck about an animated movie, fine - but when you're making a deck about a live-action production, it's a totally different ball game. The representations of the characters need to more closely resemble what the actors put on the big screen (or little screen in the case of TV shows) in order for fans to connect with them. They need not be painterly or nearly as accurate as a photograph, but making them look like super-deformed cartoon characters doesn't work well. The fans know the characters don't look like that.
Having said all that, I don't think they're taking a cartoony approach to this deck, at least not based on what little I'm seeing of the tuck box.
Shadowkat: they will charge what the market will bear. People sat by and watched the $15 mark become a benchmark of sorts without much protest, so here it is. Additionally, any deck based on a licensed property will cost more because the movie studio is getting a cut of that action.
ecNate: absolutely there's no way this deck would be made without obtaining a license first. If there's one thing that Albino Dragon hasn't done yet, it's making a deck based on someone else's IP without prior consent. Considering all the licensed properties they're planning to work with in the future, to screw up any one of them would be the same as all of them getting blown to Hell in a handbasket. If a company demonstrates a lack of compliance with copyright law, any future licenses they try to obtain (and current ones they try to retain) will be seen through jaundiced eyes. I can almost guarantee that the studios put in contract clauses allowing them to yank their licenses under such circumstances.
And I agree with you that current US copyright law has been stretched and abused beyond its original intent through corporate greed and avarice. Intellectual property was never intended to be kept ad infinitum by the rights holders by continuously extending the term limit. It was meant for protecting the ability of the rights holder to receive some financial gain from the work, but for it in the end to become a part of the public domain and accessible to all in a period of time where it's still relevant to contemporary society.
Originally, a work could be copyrighted for 14 years and the owner could apply for another 14 years before a certain deadline - no work remained out of the public domain for longer than about one-and-a-half generations. Today, the law in most cases extends copyright to 70 years after the death of the work's author. Assume that a given author wrote a book at age 30 and lived to age 70 - his work wouldn't reach the public domain until 110 years after it was created.
As when the law was initially established, a work that's a generation and a half old is still something that's accessible and relevant to contemporary culture, but when you're talking about a work that's FIVE-AND-A-HALF GENERATIONS old, it's a wholly different ballgame. Extremely few people alive today would have been alive when the work was initially created, making it nearly completely irrelevant to contemporary culture. It's like children of today casting aside their smartphones and Internet-connected computers, instead becoming engrossed with the novel "Little Lord Fauntleroy" and the manufacture of horse-drawn carriages and buggy whips. It has, in fact, been many years since any written works have entered the public domain, unless intentionally placed there by the rights holder - assuming no further extensions, copyrights will again start expiring in 2019.
But I digress. It's what I'm good at.
AD has their work cut out for them.
