Hollywood Has, Unsurprisingly, Taken All The Wrong Lessons From 'Barbie'

"Do you like good stuff? Because we've also got some absolute crap."

I wrote a nice review of the Barbie movie yesterday, which was the honest thing for me to do because the movie was great. More importantly for the suits, Barbie also had the second biggest opening of all time in terms of global box office, and many are predicting an eventual billion dollar gross — a mark which Margot Robbie (who also produced) predicted when she was pitching it.

To most people who enjoy movies, it feels like a victory for giving one of our best directors (Greta Gerwig) a healthy budget ($145 million), some of the best actors on Earth in their primes, and the creative freedom to make a PG-13 Barbie movie about fearing death. It was weird! It was allowed to be weird! It all feels like some combination of accident, anomaly, and extreme talent on the creative side. (I am nonetheless sad that test screenings apparently robbed us of a “Fart Opera” scene. Release the fart cut, you cowards! ).

But to suits, the success of Barbie unfortunately represents their long-promised glorious future of teaming acclaimed creators with “powerful IP.” And so they immediately announced plans to try to recreate the success of the Barbie movie by greenlighting some of the most idiotically hare-brained movie ideas on Earth.

Much of it comes from Mattel’s Israeli-American CEO, Ynon Kriez, now being hailed as a genius, who came on in 2018 with “a vision to turn the storied toy company into an IP-driven machine, essentially creating a Mattel cinematic universe.”

“IP” is short for “intellectual property,” so saying “IP-driven machine” is essentially saying that the company would attempt to profit on things it has produced. Has this ever been tried before?? Give this man the Nobel Prize!

As for his “vision” of a Mattel cinematic universe, another way to say it is that he was attempting what virtually everyone in any entertainment-adjacent business had already been attempting for almost 10 years by that point: copying Marvel and using movies to increase the value of their brands. This is essentially what NFTs were trying to do as well — creating nuggets of IP that you could sell to someone dumber than you on the promise that someone would one day make a movie or show about that IP, thereby increasing its value.

I digress slightly, but irrespective of the fact that this was the most obvious, most imitated business strategy on Earth at the time, that had failed countless times before prior to the Barbie movie becoming a success, Variety now reports that “14 Mattel properties are currently in active development.”

These include:

- A proposed Polly Pocket movie with Lena Dunham directing and Emily In Paris star Lily Collins set to lead (who does seem pocket-sized). Mattel claims the script is actually in for that one and “it’s great!”

- Barney, produced by Daniel Kaluuya as an “‘A24-type’ of ‘surrealistic’ movie.” (Aka “what if Barney, but it sounded *cool* and not stupid?”).

- Hot Wheels, from JJ Abrams. “Abrams has described the adaptation as ‘grounded and gritty.’” (“So, you know how cars roll along the ground…?”)

- Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots, with Vin Diesel. “‘Vin is excited,’ [Mattel Films head Robbie] Brenner says.”

Vin is actually going back to his toy-selling roots here, if you’ve ever seen his toy fair performance:

- American Girl (no creatives yet attached).

- Magic 8-Ball (“probably a PG-13 thriller”).

AND SO MANY MORE, including View Master, Major Matt Mason — with Tom Hanks and prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon (!!), Uno (the card game), Wishbone (yes, another adaptation, this time with Peter Farrelly), Matchbox (as in, the cars), Thomas & Friends (the trains) with Marc Forster, and my personal favorite, The Christmas Balloon:

“Not based on a toy but based on a true story of when Mattel donated toys to help make a young girl’s dream come true after she tied her Christmas list to a balloon that was found by a grieving couple who worked with the toy company to fulfill the girl’s wishes.”

Why was the couple grieving, and what did that have to do with finding the balloon? Were they having some sort of introspective moment near water when the list balloon just happened to fly by? I guess that’s what we’ll find out.

Anyway, this actually isn’t the first I’ve heard of a View-Master movie idea, which I could swear I first wrote about in 2009 or so. In fact this entire slate inspires heavy deja vu in anyone who was writing or reading about movies in the early 2010s. Back then it felt like every day brought with another new idiotic toy tie-in movie announcement to make fun of on FilmDrunk, whether it was Hula Hoop, Ouija Board (they actually made that one, eventually), Bazooka Joe, Stretch Armstrong (with Taylor Lautner from Twilight!), or Candyland, with Adam Sandler. A lot of those were coming from Hasbro at the time, which had some success with a GI Joe movie. Now, obviously, a lot of them are coming from Mattel, thanks to Barbie, though Wham-O, Atari, and countless other toy companies (many, like Wham-O, having since been bought by Mattel) have had movie tie-in deals in the past 10 or 15 years.

It has always struck me as wild that a movie company would pay a toy company for the right to produce free advertising for their toys. And I assumed this phenomenon had died a well-deserved death some time around 2012, when Universal spent $210 million making a Battleship movie with Peter Berg. It ended up grossing $65 million domestically, limping to $303 million worldwide. We could argue over whether or not that’s considered profitable (factoring in the promotional spend, almost certainly not) but most agreed that it sucked ass, and that as a result the returns on future similar projects would probably be diminishing.

Now that’s forgotten and we’ve got some of the industry’s finest minds trying to figure out which Uno card Pedro Pascal will play. It takes a special kind of person to see Barbie become and hit and have their takeaway not be “let’s hear what else Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie want to make” but “let’s make a movie about Uno — you know, the card game!”

In some perverse corporate universe, the success of a movie about a doll that has been the subject of countless grad school theses for the last 50 years is proof of concept for a movie about card game with colored numbers. Because both are “IP!” But I guess throwing a deck of cards at Chloe Zhao or whoever is easier than picking through the slush pile for a decent script. Godspeed to the poor bastard who gets paid six figures for that one.

—

OTHER STUFF

-Pod Yourself The Wire 310, “Reformation,” with guest Francesca Fiorentini (aka Mrs. Matt Lieb) is now live on the Patreon.

-Have you seen my favorite video of the week?

https://twitter.com/texaslindsay_/status/1683294431691124738?s=46&t=G1U3BBwcF8ph2ML7VHsvHg (I’m so annoyed that you can’t embed Twitter videos on here)

Basically, there’s a real-life Tracy Flick and she seems to have spent the past three days sniffing glue. Mesmerizing.

-Speaking of political twitter videos that don’t embed, it seems Mitch McConnell’s brain spontaneously exploded on live television:

https://twitter.com/bubbaprog/status/1684265793511358474

Very cool that people who wouldn’t be trusted to operate a car are running a whole country. Did the founders consider this one?

-My favorite “accidental image juxtaposition” of the week:

I don’t think that’s her, man.

-Rolling Stone has a great long read about a prolific scam artist that one victim says “wreaked havoc on the entire horse community.”

That’s gonna be an instant click from me, dog.

If there’s a common thread in all this, it’s that the one silver lining in this mass enshittification is that we also seem to be living through a golden age of grifters.

That’s all for now.