Care Bears Find a New Owner as Authentic Brands Buys the Franchise

The bears with feelings on their bellies are changing hands.

The deal

Authentic Brands Group said it has agreed to acquire the Care Bears intellectual property from the franchise's current owners, the investment firms IVEST Consumer Partners and Cloverlay, Variety reported. Financial terms were not disclosed, and the deal is expected to close in the third quarter of 2026. For Authentic, the New York–based brand-management company best known for Reebok and the estates of stars like Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe, it is the first acquisition of a character-based entertainment franchise.

What Care Bears is

Care Bears began in 1982 as characters drawn for American Greetings cards before exploding into plush toys, a syndicated cartoon and feature films that became fixtures of 1980s childhood. The property now spans more than 100 bear characters — each marked by a "belly badge" standing for an emotion — and reaches consumers in some 190 countries through a network of more than 500 licensing partners, according to figures cited in the announcement.

Why Authentic

Authentic's model is built on owning a trademark and orchestrating a web of licensees rather than running factories or studios itself. Executives said they plan to do more than maintain the catalog: the company intends to develop new content through its in-house studio arm, stage live events and expand into gaming, layering fresh output onto a licensing engine already operating at scale. The purchase fits a broader Hollywood and toy-industry appetite for nostalgia brands with built-in audiences, as streamers and merchandisers compete for properties that carry generational memory.

What comes next

With the deal set to close by the fall, the existing roster of licensees gives the new owner an immediate revenue base, while Authentic's studio gives it a path to new Care Bears animation or other media. Whether a licensing powerhouse can turn childhood sentiment into a durable modern franchise is the open question — but four decades and billions in sales suggest there is still an audience that cares.