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Message: <blockquote data-quote="embee" data-source="post: 8137542" data-attributes="member: 7026827">DC Comics is wholly owned, ultimately, by Warner Bros. Marvel Comics, likewise, is owned by Disney. Neither Disney nor WB are going to be putting them up for sale anytime soon and subsidiaries can't just up an merge with subsidiaries of outside corporations. Old Navy can't just up and merge with Marshall's because Old Navy is a subsidiary of GAP, Inc. and Marshall's is a subsidiary of TJ Maxx. Moreover, if they were going to, they would have done it in the last 3 years. Antitrust enforcement dropped precipitously under Trump with only a few high-profile exceptions who had famously annoyed Trump on a personal level. That lax enforcement is in no small part how the Fox acquisition happened. It was a horizontal acquisition which is the exact kind that the DOJ tends to frown upon. It happened entirely under Trump's presidency and involved a bidding war with Comcast, which owns CNN, NBC, and MSNBC, all major critics of Trump and who he often vocally opposed. Again, if Disney had wanted D&D, it would have bought it. Netflix is a media company. It has no experience in the toy business. And if it wanted (and was even able to) buy Hasbro, it would have by now. Yes, the pandemic improved Netflix' revenues. But it also improved Hasbro, which saw growth during the lockdowns. Hasbro owns a lot of toy franchises. Everyone knows Transformers but they then sleep on MLP:FiM. Mattel can't buy Hasbro. It just isn't big enough. It has Barbie, He-Man/She-Ra, Fisher Price, Hot Wheels, and American Girl. But losing the Disney Princess license was huge. I could see Hasbro and Mattel TRYING to merge but Mattel simply is not financially able to buy Hasbro. But again, antitrust enforcement will crack down under a Biden administration. The big players are LEGO, Hasbro, and Mattel. And two of them merging is a horizontal merger which is unlikely to happen without the parties having to spin off marquee brands that are central to them.</blockquote>

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