The Mezco Files
Fifteen years, three scales, one long promise
Mezco has been making ThunderCats on and off since 2011, and putting ThunderCats on brand sheets it never built since 2015. At San Diego Comic-Con 2026 the biggest of those promises finally turned up in a glass case. This is the whole story, kept current as it moves.
Last updated 24 July 2026
The short version
Mezco revealed the first One:12 Collective ThunderCats figure, Lion-O, at San Diego Comic-Con on 24 July 2026. It is a painted prototype with a cloth tunic and the Sword of Omens, shown at booth 3045 under a Coming Soon card. Mezco has not announced a price, a release date or a pre-order. The One:12 line standard is $116 in 2026. A separate 3.75 inch 5 Points ThunderCats set was shown the day before.
Our report from the show floor Lion-O Finally Has a Body: the One:12 Collective ThunderCats breaks cover at SDCC 2026 Read the full reportThe State of Play
6 in / 1:12 . Premium tier
Lion-O shown in prototype at SDCC 2026, booth 3045. Cloth costume, full articulation, Sword of Omens. Mezco says more reveals are coming.
The One:12 Lion-O in detail3.75 in . Stylised tier
A seven-piece ThunderCats set on the SDCC 2026 stand: Lion-O with the Claw Shield, Tygra, Cheetara, Panthro, Mumm-Ra the Ever-Living, the decayed Mumm-Ra and Ma-Mutt.
All seven 5 Points figures14 in . 2011 to 2016
The line Mezco actually shipped. Eleven releases across five characters, including four San Diego Comic-Con exclusives and a plush Snarf. Secondary market only.
The full Mega Scale catalogueSan Diego Comic-Con 2026
On 24 July 2026, on the second day of Comic-Con, Mezco put the first One:12 Collective ThunderCats figure behind glass at booth 3045 and posted him to the world. Sword up, cloth tunic, cartoon-accurate portrait, and a card that says nothing more useful than Coming Soon.
Booth photography by @thundercatsnow and @thebadassreviews on Instagram. Reveal art and case photo: official Mezco Toyz images.
The full One:12 Lion-O breakdown
Straight Answers
Everything Mezco has and has not confirmed about the One:12 Collective Lion-O, in one place. We update this the moment any of it changes.
Nothing above is a live offer. The $116 figure is the current One:12 Collective line standard and is shown for reference only; Mezco has quoted no ThunderCats price.
Live Updates
Mezco has said more reveals are coming through the Comic-Con weekend. This log moves as they land.
Mezco posts the first look at the One:12 Collective Lion-O ahead of MezcoCon and puts him in the case at booth 3045. Painted prototype, cloth tunic, Sword of Omens, Coming Soon card. Mezco says more reveals are coming through the weekend.
A seven-piece 3.75 inch 5 Points set appears on the Mezco stand: Lion-O with the Claw Shield, Tygra, Cheetara, Panthro, Mumm-Ra the Ever-Living, the decayed Mumm-Ra and Ma-Mutt. No price or format announced.
Mezco Toy Fair reveal number eight: the ThunderCats logo on a red field stamped One:12 Collective, under the heading ThunderCats Are On The Loose. Logo only, no figures.
2015 . The Receipt
This was never a new idea. On 18 February 2015 this site published photographs of Mezco One:12 Collective brand sheet, taken at the company Toy Fair preview. It is a two-page spread of the properties Mezco intended to build in its then-new premium scale.
Left-hand column, third down, sitting between Mortal Kombat Klassic and Birdman: ThunderCats Classic. In company with DC, Batman, Star Trek, Breaking Bad, Universal Monsters and Beetlejuice.
Mezco would not confirm it on the record at the time. We also noted that the project manager the company put us in touch with, Pierre Kalenzaga, was assigned specifically to the One:12 Collective scale. Our conclusion in 2015 was that ThunderCats in 6 inch scale was further along than Mezco was admitting.
Then nothing. The Mega Scale line ran on to 2016 and stopped. The One:12 ThunderCats sat on that sheet, unbuilt, for over a decade.
The figure in the case at Comic-Con this weekend is the one that sheet promised in February 2015. Eleven years and five months, from a photograph of a printed page to a painted prototype behind glass.
The Long Road
Mezco takes the licence and opens with a 14 inch Lion-O: seven points of articulation, Sword of Omens, Claw Shield, frozen mid-roar. A San Diego Comic-Con variant adds a glow-in-the-dark alternate head.
The Ever-Living gets the same Mega Scale treatment, with a glow-in-the-dark SDCC two-pack. Panthro joins the line.
Cheetara arrives, plus a Comic-Con exclusive Cheetara and Snarf pairing.
thundercats.org photographs Mezco One:12 Collective property sheet at Toy Fair. ThunderCats Classic is on it. Mezco declines to confirm a line.
Tygra, a Phasing Tygra SDCC exclusive, a Lion-O and Snarf two-pack and a plush Snarf. Then the line stops, and Mezco goes quiet on ThunderCats for a decade.
Mezco Toy Fair reveal number eight: the ThunderCats logo on a red field, stamped One:12 Collective, under the heading ThunderCats Are On The Loose. No figures, no names, no date.
A seven-piece 3.75 inch set turns up on the Mezco stand. First physical Mezco ThunderCats product seen in ten years.
A painted prototype in the case at booth 3045, ahead of MezcoCon, with Mezco promising more reveals across the weekend.
The Archive
The Mega Scale line, 2011 to 2016. For a long stretch, before Super7 ULTIMATES and long after Bandai, these were the definitive large-format classic ThunderCats.
The Workbench
Rough sculpts Mezco surfaced during the Mega Scale development run, preserved here as a record of the process rather than as products. None of these shipped in this form.
The Analysis
Five companies are making ThunderCats right now. The question every collector is asking is whether that is a golden age or a pile-up. Here is the honest shape of it: ten rungs, from a $14 crossover figure to a $250 statue.
US MSRP, retrieved 24 July 2026. Mezco ThunderCats pricing has not been announced; the One:12 and 5 Points figures show the current line standard for those tiers, not a confirmed ThunderCats price. The Mattel figure is the MOTU Origins crossover, not a standalone ThunderCats line.
Nine of these ten rungs are separated by scale, price or both, which is the configuration that has historically let multiple lines coexist on one property. The exception is the middle. Super7 ULTIMATES sits at 7 inches for $65. Mezco One:12 will sit at roughly 6 inches for something close to $116. Same shelf, same buyer, adjacent size, roughly double the money. That is the only genuine collision in the whole ladder, and it is the one worth watching.
The Argument
Roughly fifteen distinct ThunderCats products landed across five companies in a single Comic-Con weekend. Here is the evidence on both sides, and what it actually predicts.
Playmates at mass, NECA at 7 inch, Super7 ULTIMATES at $65, Mezco and Mondo above that, concurrently, for about fifteen years. Every line that eventually ended did so because of a licensing decision or a content gap, not because a rival line ate it.
Circana US data for 2025 shows toys priced $30 to $69.99 growing 18% year on year, the fastest of any segment, while the $15 to $19.99 band posted one of the steepest declines. Different price tiers behave like different markets rather than one wallet being divided.
At its 2024 peak MOTU had Origins, Masterverse, New Eternia, three crossover sub-lines and two Mondo scales running together. By early 2026 Mattel had paused Masterverse and the mash-ups and consolidated around a single collector line. The casualties were the ones that duplicated an adjacent tier.
Licences used to be carved by format: one company got 6 inch, another got 12 inch. Reporting from Toy Fair 2026 describes that discipline breaking down, with multiple licensees now permitted to make broadly the same thing. That is the actual mechanism behind saturation, and it is a licensor decision rather than a demand problem.
A standard ThunderCats ULTIMATES went from $45 in 2020 to $65 in 2026. A standard One:12 went from about $80 in 2016 to $116. Tariffs pushed a further 8% surcharge onto Super7 in April 2025 and a surcharge onto Mondo in 2026. More lines at higher prices is a harder ask than more lines at flat prices.
Graded and boxed LJN ThunderCats from 1985 to 1987 trade far above original retail, with a sealed 1985 Lion-O averaging over a thousand dollars against a $5.99 sticker. A collector base that deep is what underwrites five simultaneous modern lines in the first place.
The risk to ThunderCats in 2026 is not that fans run out of money. The evidence for that version of glut is weak, and the price-tier data argues against it directly.
The real risk is narrower and more specific. It is that two lines end up at the same size for the same buyer, the licensor notices, and solves it by not renewing one of them. On the current ladder ThunderCats is well configured: five tiers, almost no overlap, each aimed at a different wallet. The pinch point is Mezco One:12 against Super7 ULTIMATES, and even there the scale gap and the price gap give both a reason to exist.
The thing that would change this picture is not another figure. It is a master toy licence. Warner Bros. Discovery has not appointed one for ThunderCats since Bandai in 2010, and the current arrangement is a pool of specialist collector licences with no single company holding the whole property. If a master licensee turns up ahead of the film, that is when the specialists start losing rungs. Watch for that announcement, not for the next reveal.
The Other Variable
On 22 June 2026, at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, Warner Bros. Pictures Animation confirmed ThunderCats on its development slate, alongside Tom and Jerry and Meerkats. That is a genuine, official confirmation and it is worth being precise about what it is: one clause of a press release. No director, no writer, no cast, no date, no stated animation style. ThunderCats does not appear on the studio dated release slate, which currently runs through to November 2028.
Separately, Adam Wingard hybrid-CGI ThunderCats feature, set up at Warner Bros. Pictures in March 2021, has no verified update since March 2024, when Wingard said a draft was cruising forward. He and his co-writer then spent 2024 and 2025 making an unrelated film. Nobody has established whether the Annecy title absorbs that project, replaces it or runs beside it, and no outlet has obtained a Warner Bros. comment either way.
What a screen announcement reliably does, on the evidence, is sign licensees and lift the vintage market, twelve to twenty-four months before anyone sees a frame. What it does not reliably do is reach children. The 2026 Masters of the Universe film shipped with more than seventy licensing partners and a six-week retail head start, and under 5% of its opening weekend audience was under twelve. The halo landed almost entirely on the adult collector and vintage tiers.
Which, for ThunderCats specifically, is not a bad forecast. Every line on the ladder above is aimed at adults. If the Annecy confirmation firms into a dated film, the most likely effect is more collector product and higher vintage prices, not a wall of ThunderCats at Target.
Questions
No. As of 24 July 2026 Mezco has shown the figure at San Diego Comic-Con with a Coming Soon placard and nothing more. No price, no pre-order and no release window have been published. For context only, the standard One:12 Collective figure sells for $116 in 2026 and the deluxe tier runs to $180, but ThunderCats pricing has not been confirmed.
There is no pre-order. Mezco typically opens One:12 pre-orders through its own site and specialist retailers once a figure moves past prototype, which is usually several months after a convention reveal. The booth card still reads Pending Licensor Approval, so the design is not locked.
It reads as tailored cloth in the booth photographs: there is a visible knit weave, a hemmed neckline and separately layered shoulder pads. Custom fabric costumes are the defining feature of the One:12 Collective line, so this is what you would expect. Mezco has not published a spec sheet, so treat it as an observation rather than a confirmed feature.
Only Lion-O has been shown in the One:12 Collective so far. Mezco said on 24 July that more reveals were coming through the Comic-Con weekend. Separately, Mezco showed a 3.75 inch 5 Points ThunderCats line featuring Lion-O, Tygra, Cheetara, Panthro, Mumm-Ra the Ever-Living, the decayed Mumm-Ra and Ma-Mutt.
One:12 Collective is Mezco premium tier: roughly 1:12 scale at about 6 inches, tailored cloth costumes, thirty-plus points of articulation, swappable portraits and hands, and a full accessory load-out. 5 Points is the stylised budget tier: 3.75 inches with five points of articulation, sold as singles or boxed sets. They target completely different buyers.
Yes. Mezco held the licence from 2011 to 2016 and produced the 14 inch Mega Scale line: Lion-O, Mumm-Ra the Ever-Living, Panthro, Cheetara and Tygra, plus a run of San Diego Comic-Con exclusives and a plush Snarf. For years those were the definitive large-format classic ThunderCats figures.
Since 2015. thundercats.org published photographs of Mezco One:12 Collective brand sheet from its February 2015 Toy Fair preview, and ThunderCats Classic was listed on it alongside DC, Mortal Kombat Klassic, Star Trek and Universal Monsters. Mezco never built it. The figure shown at Comic-Con in 2026 is the one that sheet promised eleven years earlier.
There are five active tiers: Mattel around $14 through the MOTU crossover, Mezco 5 Points at 3.75 inches, Super7 ULTIMATES at 7 inches and $65, Mezco One:12 at roughly 6 inches, and Mondo and Iron Studios above $240. Almost none of them overlap on scale or price, which is the configuration that has historically let multiple lines coexist. The one genuinely tight spot is Mezco One:12 sitting a scale-step below Super7 ULTIMATES at roughly double the price.
Warner Bros. Pictures Animation confirmed ThunderCats on its development slate at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival on 22 June 2026. That is a real confirmation, but it is one line of a press release with no director, writer, cast or date attached, and ThunderCats does not appear on the studio dated release slate, which currently runs to November 2028.
Sources: Mezco Toyz official Instagram and One:12 Collective catalogue, retrieved 24 July 2026; booth photography by @thundercatsnow and @thebadassreviews; thundercats.org archive, 18 February 2015; Super7, Mondo and Iron Studios published pricing; Circana and The Toy Association 2025 market data; Warner Bros. Pictures Animation Annecy 2026 slate announcement, 22 June 2026.
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