>>11356451>Mattel is rich so I doubt they would spring for less than the whole pie.Back when it was announced MAttel lost the license in 2019, it was a gigantic blow with stockholders since they no longer had anything for boys. They were desperate enough to offer LucasFilm huge amounts of money for the Star Wars license, which likely made it more expensive for Hasbro. They were super active in trying to get any license. They lost a large chunk of revenue, even if their DC toys sold like shit and constantly had to relaunch new series, because the previous line bombed.
This is why they pushed the Lightyear and Jurassic toys so hard. And everything they've produced since then hasn't been doing great (Jurassic may not have sold poorly but sales have lessened with every sequel), they've never filled in the hole that the DC license filled for boys toys.
Mattel undoubtedly had to do quite a lot of bribery to WB execs, because Mattel could have always outbid both Spinmaster and McFarlane by a half a billion dollars at every single renewal process in the past 6 years. The fact that both Spinmaster and Mcfarlane kept their DC toys on the shelves shows that sales weren't bad enough that the license was stripped from them... like Mattel.
If you're not an oldfag, you definitely don't remember how big of a shitshow the DC brand was with Mattel. Mattel couldn't keep a single DC line on the shelves longer than a couple of years, aside from DCUC (2008 - 2012). And the DCUC line at the end was basically online only, made up of Frankenstein junk... but then, so were the "new" DC toylines MAttel somehow convinced retailers to stock in their stores. Somehow Mattel kept re-re-reusing the same bodies for their DC toys all the way until 2019, when it was too late to win any fans back with "new" (outdated) engineering.
Maybe Mattel got the license back because the Discovery CEO fired the execs who stripped the license away from Mattel and now no one remembers Mattel's failures.
