Netflix just announced they're buying Warner Bros. and HBO Max for $72 billion. Seventy-two billion dollars. Let that number sit with you for a second, because what they're actually purchasing isn't a streaming service or a film studio. They're buying your childhood.

Harry Potter. Friends. Game of Thrones. The Wizard of Oz. Batman. They're betting their entire future on a single thesis: when the world feels overwhelming, we'll retreat to what feels safe, familiar, and requires absolutely zero emotional effort to enjoy. Talk about a strategic buy.

The same week this deal dropped, Zootopia 2 dominated the Thanksgiving box office with $158 million, the second-biggest Thanksgiving opening of all time, while Wicked: For Good (despite being one of the most anticipated Broadway adaptations in decades) came in second. A sequel to a nine-year-old animated movie about talking animals outperformed the cultural event of the season.

Then there's Black Friday. U.S. consumers spent a record $11.8 billion online, a 9.1% jump from last year. Buy Now Pay Later usage increased 8.9% to $747.5 million in a single day, with 80% of those transactions happening on mobile devices.

We're breaking spending records with money we don't technically have yet, buying comfort in real-time installments. We're not witnessing a broken system, we're witnessing a system working exactly as designed, for the people who designed it.

There's a term that perfectly captures what's happening here: the kidult economy. It describes adults with disposable income (or the illusion of disposable income via BNPL) choosing entertainment, products, and experiences that are simple, comforting, and low-effort.

According to industry research from Circana, adults now account for 28% of global toy sales, generating around $9 billion annually in the United States alone. Even as children's toy sales dip, adult purchases keep the industry growing.

This isn't about being immature or regressing. It's a completely rational response to living in a world that demands constant optimization, endless decision-making, and perpetual anxiety about the future.

Think about the cognitive load a single day requires. You wake up to news alerts about geopolitical instability, navigate workplace dynamics while managing your own career anxiety, make decisions about what to eat while considering your budget and your macros and whether your choices are ethical, and by evening you're supposed to have energy left for "self-improvement."

The last thing anyone wants after all that is a challenging film that makes you think. You want Zootopia. You want something that tells you exactly how to feel, wraps everything up neatly, and asks nothing of you except to sit there and receive comfort. WGSN's forecasters dubbed 2025 the era of the "Forever Young Adult," noting how cultural nostalgia is reshaping consumer behavior across every category.

This is why streaming services are leaning so hard into nostalgia properties and why Netflix just made the biggest bet in entertainment history on owning the content that raised us. They understand something fundamental about this moment: when the real world feels like too much, we don't want art that challenges us. We want art that holds us.

What makes this moment particularly fascinating and a little dystopian, is how consumer behavior and corporate consolidation feed each other in a closed loop. We're seeking comfort content because the world is overwhelming. Corporations are consolidating control of that comfort content because they know we're seeking it. The result is fewer choices, higher prices, and deeper lock-in to platforms that own our emotional anchors.

As CNN reported, some analysts and labor advocates are already raising concerns about what happens when the world's largest streaming company swallows one of its biggest competitors. The Writers Guild called it exactly "what antitrust laws were designed to prevent."

Netflix isn't just buying IP. They're buying guaranteed attention in a fragmented market. When TikTok, YouTube, gaming, and endless other options compete for our eyeballs, owning Harry Potter and Game of Thrones means owning the properties people will ALWAYS return to when they need to feel something familiar. It's not innovation. It's insurance against the chaos of the attention economy.

The irony runs deeper when you look at the spending data. According to Salesforce, despite spending more overall on Black Friday, U.S. shoppers actually purchased fewer items (down 2% from last year) while average selling prices climbed 7%. We're paying more for less, financing comfort through BNPL while corporations consolidate control of the comfort itself.

Every time we rewatch The Office instead of trying something new, every time we buy the nostalgic merchandise, every time we choose familiar content over something that might challenge us, we're voting with our attention and our dollars for a more consolidated, less diverse media landscape, and we're doing it on credit.

Juli Lennett, VP and toys industry advisor at Circana, explained the phenomenon to Marketing Brew: "When there are times of stress, which it feels like we're getting into even now, consumers do tend to lean into when they were children and lean into toys." That's not a bug in our psychology, it's a feature, and every major brand has figured out how to exploit it.

McDonald's isn't selling fast food anymore; they're selling a five-dollar time machine. From the viral Grimace Shake to the Grinch-themed Adult Happy Meal, brands are weaponizing nostalgia because they've discovered that in an age of digital isolation and crushing adult responsibility, the most powerful commodity isn't a product. It's a feeling.

WGSN's Future Consumer research shows that about 70% of consumer decisions are driven by emotional factors. That's why nostalgia marketing works so devastatingly well. It stirs genuine feelings: a sense of safety, joy, or community that comes with remembering "the good old days."

The problem is that we're increasingly financing these feelings with money we don't have yet. The Adobe Analytics data on BNPL is striking: they forecast $20.2 billion in Buy Now Pay Later spending this holiday season, an 11% increase over 2024. Roughly 79% of that spending happens on mobile, which tells you something about the impulse-driven nature of comfort purchasing.

We're not sitting down at a computer, deliberating. We're scrolling, feeling stressed, and clicking "pay in four installments" for something that will make us feel, even briefly, like everything is okay.

If you're building a brand or marketing products right now, the kidult economy presents a genuine paradox. On one hand, there's clearly an appetite for simplicity, nostalgia, and low-friction experiences. On the other hand, if everyone leans into this, the market becomes saturated with sameness, and the brands that actually break through will be the ones offering something beyond comfort: meaning, community, or genuine innovation that doesn't require a PhD to appreciate.

The smart play isn't to chase nostalgia for its own sake. It's to understand WHY people are seeking comfort and address the underlying need. People aren't watching Zootopia because they love animated animals (okay, some of them are). They're watching because they're exhausted and need something that doesn't demand anything from them.

The brands winning right now are the ones that reduce cognitive load without insulting intelligence, that create genuine comfort without being condescending, and that build communities around shared experience rather than just selling products.

Pop Mart, the Chinese toy company behind Labubu collectible figures, is a perfect case study. Their figurines, priced between $15 and $85, often sell out within minutes of restocking. Collectors view these toys not as childish indulgences but as art pieces that add personality to their spaces. As industry analysts have noted, these brands aren't just selling toys; they're selling identity, nostalgia, and belonging.

I keep coming back to this phrase because it feels important: we're not witnessing a broken system. The kidult economy, the media consolidation, the BNPL-fueled spending on comfort products, the retreat into familiar content, it's all functioning exactly as intended. The question is simply who it's designed to serve.

When Netflix can spend $72 billion to own your emotional comfort zone, when Buy Now Pay Later can extract future earnings from your present-day exhaustion, when corporations can monetize both your stress AND your coping mechanisms, the system is working perfectly for the people who built it. The rest of us are navigating the maze they created, reaching for whatever feels safe while they profit from our need for safety.

The tariffs that drove up prices this year? The economic uncertainty that's making everyone anxious? The platforms designed to maximize engagement through outrage? All of this creates the conditions that make comfort consumption feel necessary, and all of it benefits the companies positioned to provide that comfort.

I don't say this to be cynical. I say it because awareness is the first step toward making different choices. You can still watch Zootopia. You can still buy the nostalgic merch that sparks joy. The key is doing it consciously, knowing what need you're actually filling, and recognizing when your comfort-seeking is serving you versus when it's serving the system that made you this tired in the first place.

We're all navigating the kidult economy together, whether we want to acknowledge it or not. Some of us are building brands within it, some of us are consuming our way through it, and all of us are affected by the consolidation and monetization of comfort itself.

The least we can do is be honest about what's happening: that our nostalgia is valuable, that our exhaustion is profitable, and that the corporations betting billions on our need for emotional safety aren't doing it because they care about us. They're doing it because they've correctly identified that comfort is the most valuable commodity in an uncomfortable world.

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