Upper Deck Entertainment has announced a partnership with Rittenhouse Archives, which will allow Rittenhouse to create and distribute collectible trading card sets for Marvel character-based feature films starting with Fox's X-Men: The Last Stand, which will debut over the Memorial Day weekend.  Under this sublicense from Upper Deck Entertainment and Marvel, Rittenhouse Archives will release its first series of Marvel cards in early May.  The X-Men film in particular is a good fit for Rittenhouse, which has produced trading cards based on a number of science fiction and fantasy properties including Star Trek, Xena, Stargate SG-1, Farscape, Twilight Zone, Six Million Dollar Man, Conan, Planet of the Apes and The Outer Limits.

The Rittenhouse X-Men: The Last Stand Trading Cards, which are due out several weeks before the film debuts, will allow fans to preview images for the third X-Men feature film and collect autographs from key X-3 actors including Patrick Stewart and Kelsey Grammer. 

The sublicensing of the Marvel movie trading cards could well be interpreted as an indication that, with a few notable exceptions, movie trading cards, even those based on potential blockbusters, no longer make sense as mass-market products and should be targeted instead at a smaller audience of card collectors and hardcore movie fans, the kind of audience that a highly specialized and focused company like Rittenhouse Archives serves extremely well.