The series is joining Funko for the first time, nine years after its final episode. Four figures have been announced for November 2026, and each one comes with its own one-in-six Chase. All four Chases show the same thing: the vampire face.
A license revived by streaming
The Vampire Diaries ended on March 10, 2017 after eight seasons and 171 episodes. Funko had never touched the license before.
What changed can be summed up by a single ranking. On January 27, 2026, the series climbed back to ninth place in Netflix's Top TV Shows chart, nine years after its finale, driven by an audience that had not even been born when the show began. Nina Dobrev herself commented on this second life, saying the series felt as though it was airing again.
That is exactly the kind of signal Funko watches for. A long-finished license finding a new audience on streaming platforms is precisely the profile of a potentially profitable new line. And it helps explain why the first wave is arriving now rather than in 2017.
Four figures, four Chases
That is what makes this release unusual. It is rare for an entire wave to offer a Chase for every single figure. Here, all four have one, each with a one-in-six chance.
And Funko uses the same formula for each of them: the rare variant is the bloodthirsty version. In other words, the vampire face, the one the series reserves for moments when a character loses control: veins rising beneath the eyes, irises changing, fangs coming out.
For a series built entirely around people hiding what they really are in a small Virginia town, the mechanic fits perfectly. Opening the box becomes the moment when the mask drops. Few licenses can claim such a direct connection between a commercial rarity system and the very subject of the story.
The Salvatore brothers – POP #1975 and #1977
Funko has put some care into the character descriptions, which is not always the case.
- Damon Salvatore – POP #1975: « Charming, dangerous, and endlessly unpredictable », the vampire who plays by his own rules and protects the people he loves, whether they want him to or not. The final part of that sentence alone sums up six seasons of complicated relationships.
- Stefan Salvatore – POP #1977: described as haunted by his past and guided by an unshakable moral compass. The brother who spends the series fighting against his own nature, while Damon embraces his.
Both made the same choice in 1864 and drew opposite conclusions from it. Their respective Chases, showing both of them in the same state, erase that difference in a single figure. It is smarter than it first appears.
Elena and Katherine, one face for two – POP #1976 and #1978
The most interesting part of the wave, and the one that requires some knowledge of the series to fully understand.
- Elena Gilbert – POP #1976: « Caught between love, loss, and her own destiny », the heroine caught between the two brothers and a mythology far bigger than herself.
- Katherine Pierce – POP #1978: « Cunning, seductive, and always three steps ahead », the vampire who answers to no one and leaves chaos in her wake.
Both characters are played by the same actress because one is the supernatural doppelgänger of the other. Katherine came first, turned the Salvatore brothers in the 19th century, and Elena inherits her face without knowing anything about her. Displaying the two figures side by side puts the narrative device that structures the entire first half of the series directly on the shelf.
One thing to note: Katherine is being released as a web exclusive, unlike the other three. Her Chase will therefore be the hardest one in the wave to obtain, for distribution reasons on top of the one-in-six ratio.
What to look for
A wave with four Chases creates a simple arithmetic problem: getting all four comes down to pure luck, and retailers selling the variants separately know it.
Katherine is the one to prioritize, because her web-exclusive status is added on top of the Chase ratio, combining two scarcity factors. For the others, the three standard versions remain a solid starting point, and every box still gives you a chance. Pre-orders are open, with the release scheduled for November 2026.
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