A few days ago, the pony YouTuber Cxcd released his final G5 video essay, "How G5 was ALMOST the Greatest Generation". To my knowledge, this happens to be the first fully-fledged review of why Hasbro's strategy imploded, so it's worth a watch if you're curious.
Cxcd's video is over 30 minutes long and is comprehensive and detailed; this article's purpose is to outline some of the important information and arguments presented in the video.
At the end of the video, Cxcd reveals that he doesn't plan to make any more videos about G5 and will be going back to G4, due to the depressing state of G5 and the negative reception and harassment he received for covering G5.
Hasbro's brand strategy
Having purchased the animation studio Boulder Media in 2016, Hasbro began the development of G5 in 2017, and planned to release a film animated by Boulder Media in 2019. My Little Pony: A New Generation was eventually released in 2021, and would have kickstarted Hasbro's five-year plan for the direction of G5.
The film was originally to be a G4 reboot. After a lot of internal data was leaked in December 2017, revealing the film's original main cast, Hasbro higher-ups internally circulated fan responses begging them to change direction. Cxcd says the G4 reboot idea was abandoned as a direct result of this, as well as the fact that making a G4 reboot without involving Discovery would have necessitated time-consuming and expensive legal negotiations every time Hasbro wanted to use characters from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.
Cxcd makes the case that G5 was intentionally designed to be "ten times" more successful and appealing than G4, and opines that A New Generation is itself proof that Hasbro's plan should have succeeded. The evidence indicates that Hasbro recognized the importance of lore, character development and worldbuilding in MLP, and planned to make G5 appeal to a broad audience. As part of doing this they would have created a "good vs. evil" storyline spanning G5, which would have had an expansive world "without limit".
In fact, G5 was to "prove to the world" that Hasbro was a bona fide entertainment company and not merely a toymaker. This was part of then-CEO Brian Goldner's ambitious strategy to transform Hasbro into a Disney-like company: instead of licensing or commissioning media, as they had previously done, Hasbro would produce media in-house, affording them much greater control over their brands. Hasbro was serious about this bet and spent big to build up internal capacity, culminating with the US$4 billion purchase of Entertainment One in 2019.
As things stand, A New Generation remains Hasbro's first and last animated film to have been made in-house.
The demise of Hasbro's strategy and Generation 5
Between April and December 2019, Boulder Media was preparing a pitch for a 2D animated series to follow up My Little Pony: A New Generation. Cxcd says the episodes would have formed longer story arcs and would have tackled "darker topics" than My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. However, for unknown reasons, the project was put on hold and was never restarted. (Later, some concept art of this show was released, revealing that the visual style of My Little Pony: Tell Your Tale was based on it, but Boulder Media's show would have been decidedly different.)
In February 2021, Hasbro and Netflix made two announcements. Firstly, Netflix would buy the distribution rights of A New Generation, and it would be released on Netflix instead of being released in theaters by Paramount. Secondly, Netflix would be involved with the new main My Little Pony G5 series, i.e. My Little Pony: Make Your Mark. In both cases, Netflix would be covering production costs in exchange for the distribution license. (In fact, although it wasn't mentioned by Cxcd, Netflix even funded the first season of Tell Your Tale, meaning that they bankrolled the vast majority of G5's media. The first season of Tell Your Tale was contractually subject to Netflix's standards, but Hasbro was free to disregard them for the second season that Netflix didn't fund, resulting in a noticeable drop in quality and quantity of the non-English dubs.)
Cxcd says the deals with Netflix were "a win-win for Hasbro": Hasbro wouldn't need to further add to its debt left over from the Entertainment One purchase, and if the media didn't perform well, Hasbro wouldn't be directly financially penalized. As it turned out, A New Generation performed very well on Netflix, and demonstrated the wisdom of the strategy that Hasbro had followed. What happened next is another matter.
In October 2021, Brian Goldner unexpectedly died. Although he had announced he had cancer in 2014, Hasbro might not have been prepared for this eventuality (all previous CEOs except one had been members of the Hassenfeld family). Hasbro had to appoint an interim CEO before selecting the new CEO, Chris Cocks, in January 2022. Cocks had previously led Hasbro's gaming and Wizards of the Coast divisions.
For the purposes of the video's narrative, Cxcd paints Goldner as the protagonist and Cocks as the villain, although he suspects that they may have just been figureheads of rival factions within Hasbro. (An anonymous source has been quoted as saying that Cocks himself "does not believe in Brian's vision, or have interest in anything that doesn't sell toys directly".)
Although the premiere of Make Your Mark was released on time in May 2022, almost everything about it was a mess. In May 2021, Atomic Cartoons had revealed that they would be animating the new series instead of Boulder Media, and that it would be 3D rather than 2D. A year, as it turned out, just wasn't enough time to make a 3D-animated 44-minute special, and Make Your Mark Chapter 1 was released in an unfinished state and with an incoherent story. The old Hasbro had allowed the release of A New Generation to be pushed back at least twice, but the new Hasbro meddled with the Make Your Mark scripts and persistently tried to reduce costs and shorten timeframes. On top of all that, Atomic Cartoons' animators were forced to use Boulder Media's "movie-grade models" of characters and locations on greatly inferior computers, severely limiting their work.
Curiously, an early indication of Hasbro's internal issues is actually the Crystal Brighthouse. Its construction was originally to be in the film, but Hasbro told Boulder Media to cut the scene because it'd be handled in the show. However, Make Your Mark and Tell Your Tale's writers evidently didn't get the memo, as the construction of the building was ultimately never shown at all.
Although the episodes of Chapter 2 turned out significantly better, Cxcd expresses frustration that there were only "glimpses of what Make Your Mark could have been under Goldner's vision" of Hasbro: there was still meddling with the script, and the show was still limited by its timeline, budget and technical complexity.
The episodes afterwards continued to see noticeable improvements in quality, but in early 2023, Netflix rejected a proposal for a second season. Cxcd says the proposed story could have been told if Tell Your Tale season 2 had been finished, but of course, even that won't happen now, as it was abruptly cancelled in February 2024, and not even a quarter of the planned episodes were completed.
Ironically, in its pursuit of toy revenue, Hasbro has effectively destroyed whatever potential G5's media had of generating toy revenue. (As early as 2023, some MLP toys have seemingly have been abandoned in warehouses instead of being distributed and sold.)
Less than a year after becoming the CEO, Cocks announced in November 2022 that Hasbro would sell off Boulder Media, as well as most of Entertainment One. The latter was only sold for US$500 million, which is, in fact, much less than US$4 billion. This firmly put an end to Brian Goldner's vision of Hasbro, but the company remains saddled with billions in debt. (In spite of all this, Cocks appears to be interested in developing Hasbro's internal capacity to make AAA video games.)
Although G5 is now effectively over, Cocks's tenure may only have just begun. The future of My Little Pony and Hasbro hangs in the balance.
