Hot Toys Captain America Civil War Iron Man Mark 46 figure review

I’ve tried to keep my Hot Toys Iron Man purchases to a minimum. Price aside, I need to be choosy with all the Avengers variants. While I liked the original Avengers: Age of Ultron armor, the first pics of the Captain America: Civil War Mark 46 armor encouraged me to have a little patience. After a long wait, the figure has arrived…and was totally worth the hold out.

Packaging:   The Civil War line has featured some excellent packaging with its comic book reference. Featuring the leader of Team Iron Man, this package just features his squad sans Spider-Man.

One immediately apparent part of the package is its weight. The die-cast makes for a heavier than normal figure and Hot Toys packaged it with a Styrofoam covering to prevent any damage in transit.

This is a standard two-tier Hot Toys packaging with the main figure in the main black tray and the remaining accessories in the lower tray.

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Likeness:  The Mark 46 is essentially a cinematic translation of the Bleeding Edge armor with the various light panels. It looks amazing in figure form with all the armored segments, paneling details and bolts. This looks like the real deal and not a simplified toy version. Every aspect of the armor is sculpted onto the die-cast, which fully sells that realistic look.

Additionally, we get a Tony Stark head. The Robert Downey Jr. likeness is pretty impressive right down to the black eye. Looking at this Stark head to say a Mark II and Hot Toys has improved the likenesses’ tremendously.

Scale:  Fitting for an armored figure, Iron Man is slightly taller than the regular guy.

Paint:  This is where the Hot Toys difference comes in. Tony Stark may have billions, but he doesn’t have the time to polish and paint up his armor after every fight. The Mark 46 has a great metallic candy apple red and deep gold. Additionally there’s some well done silver accent points.

Look closer and you’ll spot all the wear and tear to the armor with various scrapes, chips and burn marks throughout. It’s a terrific effect and one that gives the Mark 46 a ‘lived-in’ visual.

Articulation:  Don’t let the die-cast intimidate you. This figure has a ton of articulation allowing for pretty much every Iron Man pose you could imagine. Hot Toys used a drop down articulation model for the waist and hips allowing for more pose options that it initially appears.

Besides being mindful of the paint — read those instructions first to determine the extent of the joint movement. The last thing you want to do is accidentally try and move something and break your figure.

Iron Man Mark 46 has:

• neck
• ball-jointed shoulders
• bicep
• elbow
• wrist
• wrist hinge
• torso
• waist
• hip
• thigh
• knee (double jointed)
• ankle

Accessories:  The Mark 46 comes fully loaded with a ton of posing and display options. Hot Toys has been pretty good about hitting all the essential looks for the MCU figures to simulate all of their action scenes from the films.

Iron Man comes with:

• Chest armor can be detached to reveal interior mechanical design
• Interchangeable shoulder armor (regular, missile firing)
• Fully deployed air flaps at back of the armor
• Four (4) pairs of interchangeable hands including:
  – One (1) pair of fists
  – One (1) pair of hands with articulated fingers and light-up repulsors (white light, battery operated)
  – One (1) pair of battle palms with light-up repulsor (white light, battery operated)
  – One (1) pair of hands with life-like thrust fire effect

 

Be careful in swapping the head and neck piece. It takes a little work and you don’t want to snap it.

I was thrilled with how easy the hands were to swap out. That tends to be a weak point in most Hot Toys figures, but that’s not the case here. That definitely encouraged me to swap them more often for posing.

Just like with War Machine, the Mark 46 comes with a slew of batteries you have to assemble yourself. That’s super annoying as some of the springs are positioned in a way that I had to force the batteries to stay long enough for me to close the panel. For this price point, I’d rather replace dead batteries not put all of them in to start — especially given the more delicate nature of some of the parts.

I managed to snap the heel plate off while installing the thigh batteries. It was a simple super glue job, but it’s not something that inspires a lot of confidence about moving them too much.

Light Up Feature: After the headache of installing all the batteries is over, it’s time for the payoff. For the shelf you’ll want to keep the lights off, but it’s not truly Iron Man until it’s lit up. The Mark 46 has a lot more light panels and they show up very well when they’re all on.

My biggest complaint though is the absolute essential care needed to pop off the panels to turn the light switch on. I wish Hot Toys could figure out an easier way to implement the light up feature as I’m going to be very annoyed if I break a panel just trying to turn the lights on. My figure’s right forearm piece started to get weak after a few switches. I’m hoping super glue strengthens it back up, but of all the areas, the ones for the hands shouldn’t have this problem.

Worth it? The die-cast and light up features definitely jack up the price some. But with the quality of the metal and articulation, I see where all my money went. At $345 this is isn’t cheap, but this also might be the last MCU Iron Man figure you’d need in your collection.

Rating: 9.5 out of 10

Where to get it? Sideshow Collectibles is your first best bet thanks to their reward points system and payment plan of as low as $115 a month. Big Bad Toy Store has him in stock as well for $345 minus the payment plan.