Mid-Year Recap: The Biggest Licensing Stories of 2026 (And How My Predictions Held Up)

Six months in, and 2026 has already delivered a mega-merger, a record-breaking animated film, a viral water bottle, a Care Bears acquisition, and a move to LA. David Born goes back through the Born to License archive to score his own predictions, revisit every major story, and catch you up on everything that's shaped the licensing industry in the first half of the year.

From Toy Story 5 taking over an entire city before it even opened, to the Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery deal closing faster than anyone expected — and what it means for the licensors who now sit at the very top of the industry — this is the episode that connects all the dots.

David also recaps the guest conversations that stuck with him most: a licensee who fought for months to land Pokémon and called it their best license ever, and a client whose business grew 30% year-on-year after securing a Disney deal. Plus, some personal milestones — trekking to Everest Base Camp fully offline for the first time in 12 years, visiting the world's first standalone SpongeBob restaurant in São Paulo, and making the move to his fourth home continent.

If you've been listening since January, this is the episode that ties it all together. If you're new, this is your starting point.

Topics covered:

• Toy Story 5 predictions vs. reality — and the Taylor Swift connection nobody saw coming
• Super Mario Galaxy's promotional rollout: McDonald's, General Mills, Fisher-Price and a Guinness World Record
• Why a soft Star Wars box office means almost nothing for licensing
• The Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery merger and what it reshapes for the whole industry
• Care Bears, the Crayola x CamelBak moment, and the Oscar-winning film that became a licensing story
• Guest highlights: what the best licensees actually do differently
• Personal: Everest Base Camp, São Paulo, the Hello Kitty Cafe, and moving to LA

🧠 Key Insight: 

Box office success doesn’t always equal licensing success. And in 2026, power is shifting toward IP ownership, scale, and evergreen brands.

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Transcript

Back in January, I sat down and made a bunch of predictions about what 2026 would do to our licensing industry. A mega merger, a stacked theatrical calendar, talent getting shaken loose from the biggest studios in the world. And now, six months later, we're halfway through the year and honestly, it's played out faster and stranger than even I expected. So today I'm doing something a bit different. I'm going back through the Born to License archive at the Halfway point through 2026 to school score my own predictions, revisit the biggest stories and catch you up on everything that's happened in licensing since January. Deals, acquisitions and Oscar winner viral products, movie hits and misses, toy fairs on three continents, and a few personal detours along the way. I'm David Born and this is Born to License. 

 Now let's start where I started this year, the Movie Predictions episode. That episode became one of the most listened to ever. And looking back, I want to grade myself on three calls in particular. First, Toy Story 5. Here's what I said in January. The Toy Story franchise has always been licensing gold. Yes, this is the fifth film, so we could see a little bit of franchise fatigue, but honestly, I think Toy Story will be unavoidable at retail, which was the case in 2019 with Toy Story 4. I'm giving this one a wait for it, a 10 out of 10. This will be absolutely huge. I stand by every word of that, except for the franchise fatigue, where there was absolutely none. 

 By the time the film actually opened in June, I just moved to LA and Toy Story 5 had taken over the city before I'd even unpacked. Papa John's converted a restaurant into an actual Pizza Planet. Kellogg's brought back physical inbox prizes for the first time in a decade. Actual collectible SPoon shaped like Woody Buzz and Jesse and Taylor Swift wrote an original song for Jesse's storyline that dropped the same week. Toy Story didn't need that boost, but it got one anyway from Taylor ahead of her big wedding. The second call, Super Mario Galaxy. I said Nintendo and Illumination were going cosmic and that this would be massive for consumer products. What actually happened was one of the wildest promotional rollouts I've seen in years. 

 Jakks Pacific Toys, Mattel's, Fisher Price, little people bringing Mario characters toddlers time ever McDonald's, where I actually went to a McDonald's restaurant and tried one of the Super Mario Galaxy ice creams, General Mills. They did a promotion on over 100 participating SKUs, Pepsi's, bubbly water, and even a Guinness world record for the world's smallest popcorn bucket, a tiny bowser cauldron. Mario is not a brand that needs a film to sell, but the film gave every retailer a reason to go big at exactly the same moment. Now the one that didn't go to plan Star wars. The Mandalorian and Grogu open respectably but then dropped 70% in its second weekend. The worst second weekend decline of any Disney era Star wars film. 

 And at the same time, two low budget films from first time YouTube directors, Obsession and backrooms actually outgrossed it in the same month. Here's the thing though. Back on Star wars day, I made an argument I still believe completely. Star wars has this rare quality that almost no other franchise has. Kids wear Star wars without knowing what Star wars is. I've seen it firsthand. Parents buy their toddler a Grogu backpack. The kid has no idea who Grogu is. They haven't even seen the show or the movie. But they love it. So when the box office numbers came in soft, my honest answer on what it meant for licensing was almost nothing. Our client Hippo Blue sells Star wars bento boxes and drink bottles to families whose kids have never seen a single Star wars film. That's not a franchise chasing box office. 

 That' icon that's been passed down for 50 years. Evergreen Brands don't need a box office win, they just need to keep showing up. And next year will be a big year for Star wars with 50th anniversary of the New Hope and also the next big film. Now to the story I flagged as the elephant in the room back in January, and it moved even faster than I predicted in January. Here's what I said. The Netflix Warner Brothers Discovery deal is going to dominate headlines throughout 2026. Or will it be the Paramount Warner Brothers Discovery deal? Whatever it is, we probably won't see it finalized this year. I was completely wrong about the timeline. Netflix walked away from its $82.7 billion bid and Paramount, under David Ellison, won the bidding war outright. 

 I recorded an emergency episode the day it broke because the licensing math is staggering. Paramount alone is already the 12th largest licensor in the world. Warner Brothers discovery is the sixth. Sixth. So combined you're looking at roughly $22 billion in license retail sales, which would make this new combined entity the fourth largest licensor on the planet, ahead of NBCUniversal and Mattel in one move. SpongeBob, Paw Patrol Yellowstone sitting alongside Looney Tunes, DC Comics, Scooby Doo and Harry Potter. Now that is a catalog that starts to genuinely rival Disney. But here's the part that actually keeps me up at night, and I said it plainly on that episode, and it's still keeping me up at night today when two massive licensing departments merge in the name of efficiencies. And let's be honest, that's what's going to happen. 

 Great people lose their jobs and great brands get left on the shelf. But what happens to Beavis and Butthead, Ren and Stimpy? And on the Warner Brothers side, what about Yogi Bear, the Jetsons? Iconic brands that Alina combined team may simply not have the bandwidth to develop properly. Now, that deal isn't the only acquisition story from the first half of the year. Sony bought a 41% stake in Peanuts for $450 million, valuing the whole franchise at $1.1 billion. I used analogy on that episode that a lot of people connected with. Licensing Peanuts isn't like borrowing a library book. It's like borrowing the Mona Lisa. And the Louvre is watching everything you do with it. 75 Years of brand equity, 1200 licensees worldwide, and a robust approval process that protects every single one of them. And then there's the more recent acquisition news. 

 Care Bears Authentic Brands Group, the machine behind Reebok, Elvis and Marilyn Monroe signed a deal to acquire the Care Bears ip, its first real character franchise. The private equity group that sold it bought Care bears for around $100 million in 2023. They grew it roughly fourfold, and it's now past three quarters of a billion dollars in retail sales. If you want to understand why investors are suddenly circling classic character ip, that is the case study right there. So here's the story. Fewer, bigger owners of the IP we all license. And that reshapes who we sit across the table from and how much power is on their side of it. Now, let's talk about this year's Oscars. I've said this on the show before, and I'll keep saying it. Best Animated Feature, not Best Picture is the most important category at the Oscars. 

 From a licensing stand, Best Picture winners almost never translate into a real consumer products business. Best Animated Feature winners built entire retail categories. Think of Shrek, Finding Nemo, Frozen, Toy Story 3, and Toy Story 4. So going into this year's ceremony, I laid my cards on the table. K Pop Demon Hunters is the one I've been watching most closely. This property became much bigger than anyone anticipated. The bookmakers had K Pop Demon hunters at a 93% probability of winning. I am of course backing K Pop Demon Hunters Tonight and K Pop Demon Hunters 1. It's been the single most talked about IP in licensing for six straight months, dominating toy fairs on three continents before most retailers had product ready to sell. Netflix's own CMO admitted on the main stage at Licensing Expo that they were caught flat footed early. 

 The movie broke and there simply wasn't enough product on shelves fast enough. That has since been course corrected very hard with Hasbro and Mattel both taking on significant licensing roles. Now this has been a big year for trade events. So far this year the Born team covered toy fairs on three continents. I was in Melbourne for the Australian Toy Hobby and Licensing Fair, the largest event of its kind in the Southern hemisphere. At the same time, Jenna from our team was at the London Toy Fair and Brynna from our team was at New York Toy Fair. All three of us reported back with the exact same headline. K Pop Demon Hunters was unavoidable on every show floor. And that was months before the Oscar was even handed out. Then came the big one. 

 Licensing Expo 2026 was our first year ever exhibiting after 13 years of me attending as a guest and the numbers back up. Something I've been feeling all year in person is genuinely back 400 exhibiting companies, the largest exhibitor presence in the show's history. Over twelve and a half thousand total attendees. More than one and a half thousand qualified retailers in the room. Real decision makers from Walmart, Target, Adidas, Zara and popmart and Licensing International announced on the opening day that the global brand licensing industry is now valued at $389.8 billion. That's up a pretty significant 5.45% year over year. Now some exhibitors told me the floor TRaffic felt lighter than previous years and I want to be honest about that rather than pretend that I wasn't getting that kind of feedback. 

 But I would say most of the exhibitors I spoke to were really pleased. But really, both things can be true. Record exhibitor numbers and a slightly different feel underfoot. And a room where 49% visitors held genuine global decision making power. Nearly one in three exhibiting companies, 130 of them were there for the very first time. Independent creators, two month old brands, people who'd built real audiences on Instagram and TikTok and decided it was time to show up in person. That's the momentum. New blood, new IP and the industry that's still fundamentally built on being in the room. Now onto the topic that is on everyone's mind regardless of the industry you're in. That is, of course, AI. And I dedicated Real time to AI this year because it would be naive to think our industry is immune. 

 The turning point for me was Disney's deal with OpenAI at the end of last year. When the most protective IP holder on the planet signs with OpenAI, it the entire industry permission to start having conversations that they weren't willing to have six months earlier. That and then the deal fell through after OpenAI decided to wind down their Sora product. But it was still a strong indication that the entertainment industry will inevitably find ways to incorporate AI into what they do. They have to. To stay ahead, I got to take the AI conversation live on a panel at the Networking hub at Licensing Expo. It was a full house, standing room only, which I'll take as a win considering the one and only Sharon Osbourne was speaking on another stage at the same time. Here's the exchange I keep coming back to. 

 AI is not a replacement for two fundamental things that drive the licensing industry. The first one is trust, and the second one is relationships. Everybody under this roof, you know, works around trust and relationships. There are people that have been in the licensing industry for decades and have built up those relationships and they just cannot be replicated through AI. But I also use that stage to raise the warning I believe in just as strongly. AI can now handle a lot of administrative entry level work. That used to be how people broke into our licensing industry. Here's a bit more on that. Where would I be if I didn't have that opportunity at Haven licensing in Australia 20 years ago doing a lot of administrative tasks? I certainly wouldn't have a team of 14 people now bringing innovation to the industry. 

 And I think we just have to be really mindful of that. It's tempting, it's really tempting to say we're not going to hire this junior, we're just going to have it all scooped up and done through AI. But the truth is that those juniors are the future of our businesses and of our industry and we need to make sure that we're being really mindful of that. My advice? Use AI to make your experienced people faster. Don't use it to avoid hiring the next generation. We need them now. One of the trends I'm proudest of this year is how far licensed characters have pushed into advertising and our team has been right in the middle of it. Twix launched an out of home campaign in the UK built entirely around famous duos split in half. 

 Rick without Morty, Wallace without Gromit, Laurel Without Hardy, no taglines needed. Your brain does the work Instantly Born Licensing managed the process from start, finish, and it's the clearest proof of something I've believed for years. When a brand licenses a famous character, it's borrowing decades of built in awareness instead of building recognition from zero. More recently, we launched Count before you click for Take 9, a scam prevention initiative starring the Count from Sesame Street. Of course, the Count has been counting since 1972, and the generation that grew up with him is the exact same generation now managing digital safety for their kids and their aging parents. And that's not a coincidence. That's a deliberate licensing choice. It ran across us Linear TV streaming, social and digital. Let's talk about some product highlights. 

 I recently talked about the water bottle that broke LinkedIn, a limited edition Camelback collection shaped and colored like classic Crayola crayons, right down to the lid design to mimic the crayon tip. And here's what almost nobody said out loud. It's a licensed product. Crayola granted camelbak the right to use its brand, its colors, and its iconic crayon design in a brand new category. A licensing team on the Crayola side managed the negotiation, the approvals, the royalty reports, all of it. And here's the twist. The product had actually launched seven months earlier with almost no attention at all. The moment found the product, not the other way around. Now put that next to a story from the other end of the spectrum entirely. America 250. 

 This year marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and behind every flag and firework is an official license program. There were more than 200 approved licensees, spanning apparel, eyewear, watches, bourbon, even premium cigars. My personal favorite is the one that tells you everything you need to know about how far a licensing program has properly arrived. Have a listen an official licensed America 255 gallon bucket from home Depot. A licensed bucket? Yes, that's right. When the branding reaches the humble hardware bucket, you know a licensing program has properly arrived. So we had a viral water bottle and a hardware store bucket. On paper, nothing really connects them, but in practice, they're the exact same mechanism. A license or granting rights, an agent or team managing the approvals, the royalty reporting, the brand guidelines. All invisible to the person that's actually buying the product. 

 One went viral by accident on LinkedIn seven months after launch, and the other one was sold out when I went to Home Depot to try and buy it. So that was a huge success as well. Neither of These gets called licensing by the people covering it or even the people buying it. But both were great examples of licensing. And that's really the story of our industry. In two objects. Licensing is a $380 billion global business, and it's hiding in plain sight. It's everywhere. And almost nobody outside our world uses the word licensing out loud. Something else substantial that happened this year. Pokemon turned 30. The brand launched in Japan, and it is by every measure the greatest licensing machine the world has ever built. Over $103.6 billion in licensed retail sales across its lifetime. More than Disney, more than Star wars, more than Marvel. 

 In 2024 alone, it generated $12 billion in license retail sales, making it the seventh largest licensor in the world. And that's just across a single brand, Pokemon. And this year, right on cue for the 30th birthday, Logan Paul sold his PSA Grade 10 Pikachu Illustrator card for $16.492 million. Officially the most expensive trading card of any kind ever sold at auction. Not just the most expensive Pokemon card, the most expensive trading card period. Generational reach, emotional connection, and scarcity mechanics. That's the formula. And 30 years in, nobody does it better than Pokemon. Now, two of my favorite conversations this year were with people building licensing programs from the ground up on completely different scales. David Fogarty took the Oodie from 500 to $850 million in sales and unlike almost every guest I have on licensors came to him. 

 His first deal was with Warner Brothers Friends and Harry Potter, and It did around $10 million. But the advice he gave that stuck with me most wasn't about chasing the big names. Have a listen. 

 You don't even want to work with the big licenses until you've got your team together. You understand how to forecast your brand. You understand your, your forecast in terms of SKUs, but also revenue, because you're just going to get yourself in a lot of hot water. So I think that in the very early stages, if we tick the box of I understand what my brand stands for, and then we tick the box of finding a collaboration partner that stands for something similar at a similar size that is quite lenient around their licensing structures, that's a match made in heaven. 

 He also told me that getting the Pokemon license was one of the hardest things UDI has ever pulled. Months of persistence with almost no direct line in, and it became, in his words, their best license ever. Now, I also spoke to Aldo, who runs Courtney Brands and its retail brand Hippo. Blue out of my hometown of Melbourne. Now the Born to License team negotiated a Disney license for them. Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar, Mickey Mouse, and many more. And the results were absolutely staggering. A 400% increase in customer acquisition and the overall business grew 30% year on year. His advice for anyone starting out was simple. 

 So I would say manage expectations, keep. 

 It simple, start small. 

 Results will come. 

 Just be patient. Now, before we wrap up, a few personal updates from the first half of this year. Because this show is as much about the person doing the licensing as the licensing itself. In April, my partner and I spent eight days completely offline trekking to Everest base camp in Nepal. No emails, no calls, no social media. 12 Years running, born Licensing and I had never once been fully unreachable. And what I came back to, it wasn't a crisis like I was worried about. It was proof that the business didn't need me in the room every day. Have a listen. One of the most surreal experiences of my life. For the past week, I've been completely offline. No phone, no emails, no social media. And I didn't even call my mum. Instead, I was trekking to the base camp of Mount Everest. 

 And when you're up there staring at the highest mountain on earth, the licensing industry feels very far away. Then in June, I made the move to Los Angeles, my fourth continent as a home base. I've lived in Melbourne, London, Brazil, and now I'm here. It's not a lifestyle decision, it's really a market decision. The US is the largest segment of our client base. Most of our studio relationships run through this city. And if you're running a licensing agency that works with the major entertainment studios like us, there really is only one city to be in. And somewhere in between, I finally made it to the world's first standalone spongebob squarepants restaurant in Sao Paulo. Spongebob was the very first character I ever worked on almost 20 years ago, and I've licensed him more than any other character since. 

 Every detail of that restaurant, down to the bathroom tiles, was on brand. And my verdict, 10 Krabby Patties out of 10. Have a listen. We're about 20 minutes from entering Bikini Bottom. I'm very exc now behind me. It's not actually a pop up, it's not temporary. This is a living and breathing restaurant that has been around since 2024. I'm expecting a menu full of spongebob themed items. Krabby Patties, delicious fries, those kinds of things. I also managed to squeeze in a visit to the hello Kitty Cafe earlier in the year. Proof that when experiential licensing is done properly, it stops being simply marketing. It really becomes an amazing experience. So this is hello Kitty and Friends 2D by E. Asia, and it's actually one of the many hello Kitty cafes around the world. 

 But what makes this one unique is the incredible 2D black and white aesthetic. Everything you see has been hand painted to create this manga inspired illustrated look. It's like stepping inside a cartoon. The walls, the furniture, even the decorative elements, they all had these bold black outlines that make everything feel flat and stylized. It's a really clever design choice because creates an instantly recognizable visual identity that's perfect for social media. So there we have it. Six months down, six months to go. A merger that's reshaping the biggest licensors on the planet. An animated film that's both an Oscar success story and a licensing one too. A water bottle that reminded the world our industry exists. And for me, a lot of passport stamps along the way. If you've been with me since January, thank you for. For sticking around for all of it. 

 If you're new here, go back and find the episodes that made this list because you can go a little bit deeper on those. They're all in the feed. And I'll see you in the second half of the year. I'm David Born and this is Born to license.