Mattel exec dared to question Margot Robbie's take on Barbie

The tragic story of the Mattel President who hopped a plane to London to challenge final boss Margot Robbie

By Matt Schimkowitz  |  June 28, 2023 | 6:38pm
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Mattel exec dared to question Margot Robbie's take on Barbie
Margot Robbie in Barbie Photo: Warner Bros.

The moment we saw Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling rollerblading through an eye-piercing dayglow Malibu, we knew the Barbie movie was in good hands. No one was sure how to make a Barbie movie, but with a few still photos, the world unanimously agreed that Robbie and director Greta Gerwig sure did. Unsurprisingly, though, Mattel’s executives were a little bullish on the idea of a funny movie about a doll that appealed to a broad audience as opposed to a movie about an action figure that, um, wears clothes? Again, we have no idea what a Barbie movie can and should be. In a Time cover story about one-half of the double feature everyone, including Tom Cruise, plans on having this summer, writer Eliana Dockterman relays the initial reaction to Greta Gerwig’s playfully subversive take on the plastic symbol of impossible beauty standards.

“You’re just gonna white-knuckle it the whole time,” Robbie Brenner, executive producer of Mattel Films, told the company’s higher-ups. Nevertheless, all the white-knuckling in the world couldn’t stop Dickson from hopping a plane to London to argue what is and isn’t on-brand for his blonde plaything. Then he met Robbie. Though we like to imagine Robbie and Gerwig giving this millionaire a wedgie for his troubles, all they had to do was perform the scene for him. “When you look on the page, the nuance isn’t there, the delivery isn’t there,” Robbie said.

This nuance required some finessing and was also central to the product. In her first meeting with Mattel CEO Ynon Kreiz, Robbie “impressed” upon the exec that taking a self-reflexive approach to adapting a toy was the way to go. “We are going to honor the legacy of your brand, but if we don’t acknowledge certain things—if we don’t say it, someone else is going to say it,” she said. “So you might as well be a part of that conversation.”

While Kreiz and Dickson want to protect the time-honored tradition of Barbie that the marketing of this movie insists we all have and share, the last decade of films based on toys shows a split between approaches. Sure, the post-modern Lego Movie was a hit—and only burned out when Warner Bros. went wild with spin-offs and sequels—but the few Transformers that were released made money too. Though none topped the billion-dollar grosser, Age Of Extinction, they did well enough to continually thrust the ongoing saga of the All Spark on audiences for the next decade.

So will Barbie be more Lego or Transformers? We’ll know for sure on July 20, when we’re all finished throwing up after seeing Oppenheimer.

 
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