You don't have to imagine it.
I have one. I also have Demogorgon and the Kenku from Witchlight and a red dragon. There are more. These things are out there and being made. This one is licensed. I also have a Driz'zt action figure, all the Funko pops, the NECA LJN 8" figures, the animated series figures, they have an Amazon T-Shirt subscription service, other T-shirt licenses out there including with Hot Topic, children's novels and ABCs & 123s books. Our house it literally covered in D&D stuff that is licensed for us and our newborn that WOTC/Hasbro has licensed. ENworld doesn't put up posts about them. Kid Robot has a line of plushies including a Tiamat that also has some Pathfinder monsters in it. The Driz'zt is on Hasbro Pulse and comes with Gwen.
I think it's based on the same problem Netflix has and it's all around the DDB issue of shared accounts. They're looking at DDB and the average group size is 5 players, 1 DM and 4 PCs in a campaign as the average. If the DM is the main account holder and all the purchases are in that account and it is shared across all the people in the account when the DM purchases a new book, then it's 4 lost sales for WOTC on the platform. 1 in 5 is 20%. They are equating DDB to D&D itself like that is all there is to D&D which explains their obsession with the virtual tabletop market and trying to corner even non-D&D exclusive things like pagan religions, races and folklore as "Quintessential D&D content" and therefore "D&D IP" you have to accept the new OGL for and not included in the Creative Commons license if you want to publish 3pp content or face litigation. It's not about the table top games, they don't see those numbers as the big numbers, the recurrent subscriptions from DDB and purchases of the digital content on where D&D is making its money at. That is my takeaway.
The owlbear plushie isn't being sold by Hasbro, and they are making exactly zero money off it. Same with lots of other "D&D" toys.
False, Phunny made it yes but they are paying a licensing and royalty for them. Same for kid robot with their D&D branded materials. Yes this is an Owlbear toy. Purchased at Barnes & Noble. For my son. Licensed. Official. Also Demogorgon’s butt. That’s mine. I can take pictures of the tags on the rest if you like.
The goal is less to sell the movie to D&D players, but rather to sell the game (and especially D&D Beyond) to movie-goers.
For the movie to be a hit it needs about an order of magnitude more people to see it than there are DDB subscribers. That means most of them aren't current D&D players. That there isn't a movie branded D&D starters set. They can grab at target or order off Amazon while they are still on a movie high seems incompetent to the point of criminal.
