Protagonist of 'The Force Awakens' excluded from merchandising. Because she's a girl.

In December of 2015, the Star Wars franchise came out with their first of many new episodes planned to add onto the classic saga.
Making $800 million in the box office after a month into being in theaters, The Force Awakens was predicted to make a killing in merchandise sales.

One little problem. They decided to leave out the most important character from the merchandise.


This all started with the much-anticipated action figure sets of The Force Awakens characters, when none of those figures were Rey. Many merchandise came out promoting the new antagonist, Kylo Ren, but no Rey!

It got even weirder when Hasbro came out with a Star Wars: Monopoly game where you could pick to be 1 of 4 characters displayed: Luke Skywalker, Finn, Kylo Ren, and Darth Vadar. No reference to Rey in the entire game.

So inevitably, I was one of the many severely confused fans. Basing an entire movie around a woman fighting with the original Star Wars team to bring good back to the galaxy? You would think we'd see her face all over the Star Wars section of the toy store! So what gives?

As Twitter started trending #WheresRey, Disney came out with a press release blaming the the lack of Rey merchandise on "Staggered Release". According to Disney Studio's consumer product division, they planned to stagger the release of new toys displaying new characters to protect the fans from spoilers and save the plot points.

However, an anonymous interview from someone in the merchandise board spilled the beans and exposed that they had more Rey merch in the works in the beginning, but as the meetings determining these things went by, people started raising concerns about if a female character will sell to a "Prominently Male" franchise. 

"We know what sells," the industry insider was told, "No boy wants to be given a product with a female character on it."

Unfortunately, this is not the first time women in a Disney franchise got the short end of the stick. In the merchandise promoting the movies for Guardians of the Galaxy, the one woman character, Gamora, was left out of a lot of action figures, T-shirts, etc. Along with the Avengers franchise, Black Widow is rarely seen in the Marvel products. 

Thankfully, the Star Wars fanbase has given the much-needed platform for Disney's merchandise division to realize we don't condone their exclusion of female characters. Many social media posters and bloggers have expressed their opinions, exposing that men would actually love to possess the women characters in action figure form! So it's time to not only allow more women characters into this so-called "Man Franchises", but also to not exclude them from representation through products!

Thankfully, Rey has received  justice and Star Wars is booming with new products with Rey all over them, and they're selling like hot cakes! So hopefully this will give them the reality check they need, and they won't make the same mistake for the premiere of The Last Jedi.