@ned it's an exercise in 'me too'-ism where Mattel is seeing Hasbro score with Transformers movies and such from their toy line. Mattel's gone on record that they have 43 toy products they are working on developing movies about.
And everybody's taking a page from Marvel and creating a shared movie universe for their company's intellectual products. Even the newest Transformers movie ends with GI Joe in the same world.