Barbie Goes to the Movies

It was also a moment of celebration for Mattel Inc. executives 250 miles away in El Segundo, California. Since 2018 they’ve been carrying out a strategy championed by their CEO and chairman, an amalgam of tanned biceps and phosphorescent teeth named Ynon Kreiz, to reverse a precipitous sales decline by licensing the company’s intellectual property to most every studio in Hollywood. Gerwig’s film, a comedic, feminist, PG-13 take on Barbie, will be the first release for Kreiz’s “IP strategy,” and its most consequential—the dolls are Mattel’s crown jewel, driving about a third of its $5 billion in annual sales.

While the IP-to-movie playbook is by now well established, Barbie still comes with plenty of risks. It could be popular with nostalgic adults but fail to register with toy-hungry 5-year-olds. Box-office returns could be poor, hurting Warner Bros., which mostly covered Barbie’s $100 million budget, and spooking the studios that are collectively funding or considering funding 14 other Mattel movies. Or the film could backfire completely. In Barbie’s 64-year history she’s been the face of dozens of TV shows, small-screen movies, video games and books, but she’s never starred in a theatrical release. That’s not because Mattel didn’t recognize the potential upside; it’s because the potential downside was financial ruin.

Barbie was created and marketed as a toy of special personal importance to young girls—as a prototype for adulthood, a projection of a future life. Introduced at a moment in history when girls lacked real-world examples of high-powered women, Barbie, with her bombshell looks and high-flying jobs, filled a cultural vacuum. She quickly became an icon and lightning rod: Mattel’s research has shown that her fame rivals that of the British monarch or US president, and she’s about as heavily debated. Past executives feared a major Barbie motion picture could provoke such a negative reaction that it would destroy the appeal of the company’s biggest brand. Moreover, few big-budget movies with women as the target audience are ever even made—Shawn Robbins from industry tracker BoxOffice Pro puts the figure at about 6% of films costing at least the $100 million Barbie did.

But sometime over the past few decades, the calculus changed. With Mattel long reluctant to modify its most successful product, Barbie’s high heels had fallen out of step with society. By the 2000s the doll was being viewed as a relic. Seven years ago, Mattel finally began making Barbies with more realistic body types, new careers and a wider range of skin tones. Sales rose, but it wasn’t enough to reverse Mattel’s decline—that same year it lost its spot as the world’s largest toy company by market cap to Hasbro Inc. It then burned through two CEOs, endured an accounting scandal and recalled the Rock ’n Play Sleepers sold by its Fisher-Price subsidiary, which have been linked to about 100 infant deaths. Mattel rebounded during the pandemic, but that boom is over, and its stock price is about 40% lower than it was when the new Barbies came out.

Reviving the leading 20th century US toymaker will be a tall order for a single film. But already there are signs Kreiz’s gamble could work: Viral paparazzi pictures of the Barbie stars filming on Venice Beach last year sparked a Barbiecore pink fashion craze, and the movie’s trailers have been parsed on social media with the intensity of a postfeminist graduate course. “It’ll be very hard to be on planet Earth,” Kreiz says, “and not know this movie’s coming out.”

On a trip to Switzerland the following year with Elliot and the kids, Barbara and Ken, Ruth stopped short at a window display. Before her was a Bild Lilli, a busty foot-tall blond doll with heavy makeup that was based on a gold-digging comic strip character. Made in Germany, she wasn’t for kids—rather, she was frequently passed around by men as a gag gift at bachelor parties.

Through the years, Handler had seen Barbara toss aside her baby dolls in favor of paper dolls, creating make-believe stories about their fashionable grown-up existences. Handler surmised that if she replaced those paper dolls with something Lilli-like, Barbara would project her dreams of adulthood onto the 3D model instead. Handler took three Lilli dolls home and created the first prototypes for Barbie.

At the 1959 American International Toy Fair in New York, Handler presented Barbie to buyers, almost all of them men, from retailers such as Woolworth & Co. and Sears. She later recounted how they told her that little girls were interested only in baby dolls that helped them pretend to be mothers. Plus, the dolls had breasts, which the men considered lewd and unsuitable for children. Handler argued that girls wanted to be much more than mothers and that the body shape would provoke visions of their adult selves. She left the fair with far fewer orders than expected.

Undeterred, Handler took Barbie dolls to little girls directly, commissioning a TV commercial that featured a line of well-dressed plastic models on a tiered display as a woman sang in the background: “Barbie, beautiful Barbie, I’ll make believe that I am you.” A male voice told kids that everything from a wedding gown to sunglasses would be sold separately. Girls walked into department stores demanding to buy them, forcing chains that had rejected Handler’s toy fair pitch to beg her for inventory. Mattel went public the year after Barbie’s release, and soon it was the largest toy company in the world.

With her hit product, Handler unwittingly created two vexations that would long outlive her. First, Barbie’s astonishing success helped create an expectation from Wall Street of unrelenting growth. The Handlers were later accused of gaming the company’s financial records to appease those demands, resulting in their ouster from Mattel and a no-contest plea from Ruth in the mid-1970s.

Second, Barbie’s uncontrolled ascent saw her corporate stewards telling every little girl, in her most formative and impressionable years: This is the ideal woman. Managing that responsibility became a permanent challenge for Mattel. Handler herself knew the market strength of prevailing beauty standards—after all, she’d modeled Barbie after a sex doll from a country that had recently embraced Aryanism. But she also knew that girls are multifaceted, at one point making Barbie one of the first female astronauts. For some educated stay-at-home mothers, Barbie dolls served as the working-woman role model they couldn’t be themselves.

As times changed, Mattel focused on keeping Barbie at the forefront of each era’s female-empowerment movement. In 1961 she got a partner, Ken, who in a gender-role-reversing twist was a supporting character in Barbie’s story, with no real ambitions of his own. She went on to become a surgeon, a corporate executive and a US president, constantly reminding girls in ads that they could be anything they wanted to be. Mattel’s aggressive marketing of the dolls and their accessorized power suits and dream homes helped push Barbie sales past $1 billion in 1992. Handler claimed in her autobiography that the average American girl owned eight of the dolls.

Barbie also helped Mattel take risks and grow. It created lines such as Masters of the Universe and Chatty Cathy and snapped up other corporations with hit products for children, including Fisher‑Price and American Girl dollmaker Pleasant Co. At the suggestion of executive Bernard Loomis, it experimented with using branded TV shows to introduce products, starting with a show in 1969 to accompany the introduction of Hot Wheels. (Loomis later coined the term “toyetics” to refer to a TV show or film’s suitability for creating and selling toys; his strategy spread widely in the 1980s after federal rules on advertising to children slackened.)

It took a confluence of events and trends to draw Barbie’s reign to a close. In the late ’90s, Mattel was being led by CEO Jill Barad, who had a reputation for being a strong steward of the line. With video games cutting into toy sales, Barad made the call to purchase The Learning Co., maker of the popular Reader Rabbit computer game, for $3.8 billion, Mattel’s largest-ever acquisition. But executives quickly realized their new video game subsidiary didn’t have any new ideas that might relieve its cumbersome debts. By September 2000 it had agreed to sell TLC to a private equity firm at a huge loss and parted ways with Barad. It then brought in a procession of male CEOs who struggled to stay at the leading edge of kindergarten girl culture.

Around the time of Barad’s departure, a Barbie accessory designer who was still working for Mattel brought a pitch for a new type of doll to a small competitor, MGA Entertainment Inc. Called Bratz, they featured different skin colors and hair types, making them cool and accessible in a way that Barbie couldn’t match. MGA put out the first Bratz in 2001, quickly racking up $1 billion in yearly sales and obliterating Barbie’s dominant market position. In 2006, Mattel sued MGA for the rights to Bratz, arguing that its designer had created the dolls.

As the case moved along, Hasbro and Paramount Pictures came out with one of the first toy-based blockbuster movies, the high-octane, CGI-heavy Transformers. Released in 2007, the film grossed $700 million worldwide and caused sales to skyrocket. A confident Hasbro subsequently made the case to Walt Disney Co. that it should win the rights to manufacture and market Disney princess dolls, worth $500 million a year, away from a distracted Mattel.

Mattel lost the Disney license, lost the Bratz case and seemingly lost all good sense. In 2009 it introduced a line of Black Barbies, incorporating accessories such as silver chains inspired by rappers, which some found insensitive. Then it gave Barbie a new career as a computer engineer, portraying her in an accompanying book as barely competent enough to find the power button and reliant on male friends Steven and Brian to do her coding for her. When Barbie accidentally uploads a virus to her sister’s computer with a pink, heart-shaped USB device, Steven and Brian fix that, too.

Girls who weren’t White, girls who used wheelchairs and girls with midsections capacious enough for a rib cage didn’t see their future selves in Barbie. And they had Bratz dolls and ones representing witty and powerful Disney princesses available as alternative role models—not to mention their own real-life, high-achieving mothers. Barbie sales fell every year from 2012 to 2015, slumping to half the $1.8 billion they’d accounted for at their peak back in 1997. Mattel’s board churned through one CEO after the next. When the company tried again to focus on high-tech toys, introducing a talking Barbie with Wi-Fi and an artificial intelligence device designed to listen to babies and respond to their cries with lullabies, parents found them creepy.

“We weren’t connecting to the culture. We weren’t even a reflection of what pop culture looked like,” says Richard Dickson, Mattel’s president and chief operating officer. “Girls looked at us and said, ‘You’re not relevant.’ ”

But other problems were brewing. Toys “R” Us, one of Mattel’s largest partners, had just gone bankrupt. The Securities and Exchange Commission and the US Attorney’s Office opened civil and criminal investigations into accounting misstatements made before Kreiz’s tenure, which led to fines and a management shake-up. And Consumer Reports obtained a document showing that Mattel knew some 30 infants had died since the Rock ’n Play Sleeper’s 2009 release. With a story soon to be published and the American Academy of Pediatrics issuing a statement saying the device was deadly, the company issued a warning about it, then later recalled it. Kreiz was hauled in front of Congress to explain, and dozens of families sued. (Many of the cases are ongoing; Mattel disputes that the product was inherently unsafe and is defending itself in court.)

As this was going on, Kreiz was simultaneously seeking studio partners for his IP bet. If it went well, Mattel would see a rise in toy sales, spinoff lines of toys and more films based on those, and on the cycle would go. Barbie was the most obvious property to go Hollywood. There was even a script making the rounds at Sony Pictures that had Amy Schumer attached, then Anne Hathaway, telling the zany story of a Barbie who’s exiled from her idyllic world only to realize the folly of pursuing perfection. Many at Mattel, including those who’d worked on Project Dawn, disliked it. “The Amy Schumer pitch was understandably more comedic,” says Lisa McKnight, global head of dolls and Barbie at Mattel. But the parody “didn’t feel as smart and as provocative as we would have hoped for.” Kreiz says he felt the script made Barbie the butt of the joke. (Schumer dropped out of the project four months after her role was announced, later saying in interviews that their creative visions had clashed.)

One of Kreiz’s first priorities was to meet with Robbie to suss out her interest in playing Barbie. Her agent worked for Richard Lovett, the co-chairman of Creative Artists Agency and a longtime confidant of Kreiz, and within six weeks, Kreiz was sitting at the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel with Robbie and her two partners at LuckyChap Entertainment. He says that the discussion was “long” and “organic,” and that they were immediately on the same page about doing something unexpected and creating a “cultural moment.”

Lovett connected Kreiz with another client, Robbie Brenner, as a potential in-house film chief. Brenner is a powerful producer with a thick book of high-profile contacts, and she’d been nominated for an Oscar for her work on Dallas Buyers Club. When Kreiz and Brenner met, he detailed his plan to create a movie division with Barbie as the first project. They agreed that Mattel would be wise to let Sony’s option lapse and that Robbie was an ideal anchor—talented and consistently successful. And, of course, she looked like a Barbie.

After Kreiz insisted he wasn’t looking to make glorified toy ads, Brenner agreed to come on board, starting in August 2018. She held meetings with Robbie, who suggested bringing on Gerwig as a writer. Gerwig had been dominating the female-coming-of-age genre as both a writer and director, with Oscar-nominated work on Lady Bird and more on the way with Little Women.

With the stakes rising, everyone “kind of piled on,” Brenner says. She and Robbie flew to New York and spoke to Gerwig and her creative and life partner, Noah Baumbach, about a script. She says Mattel clinched Gerwig and Baumbach’s hiring by agreeing to leave them more or less alone with it. Gerwig told the executives “they were going to go off, and they were gonna write the story together, and we were going to read it when we read it,” Brenner says. “That’s definitely scary.”

On a podcast with the pop star Dua Lipa, who sings on the soundtrack and plays a mermaid Barbie in the film, Gerwig said her interest in working with Robbie and her desire for a challenge persuaded her to sign on. She described the task as a potential “career ender” given how freighted the dolls have long been. “Like, oh no. Barbie,” she said. “Where do you even begin?” But by the time the story was written, she’d grown so attached that she signed on to direct, too. “When I was writing with Noah, there was a point when we were making each other laugh all the time, and when we got to the end, we were making each other cry,” she said at CinemaCon in Las Vegas in April.

In the film, Robbie plays a Barbie who lives in a vibrant toy world filled with other Barbies of different sizes, ethnicities and backgrounds. To everyone’s surprise, she begins to question herself and discuss the possibility of death, leading her on a journey to the real world. Her existential crisis panics executives at Mattel, including its CEO, played by Will Ferrell, who screams at one point (in a conference room that strongly resembles Kreiz’s office) that he wants to force Barbie back into her box. Along for the ride is Ryan Gosling as Ken, who comes off in the trailer as good-natured but clueless, still bound by dated gender norms. In one scene he argues to a female doctor—whom he doesn’t believe is a doctor—that it’s fine for him to perform surgery without a medical degree because he’s a man. In another knowing snippet from the trailer, Barbie’s feet suddenly become flat, just as they did in real life, and the other characters gag in disgust.

“The first time I read the script,” Brenner says, “I was like: ‘Wow, wow, wow.’ ” Despite Mattel’s hands-off pledge, it did have a few notes, though. Dickson and McKnight flew to the set in England four times, to “sit with Greta and Margot and really work through some script iterations, and really talk through the significance and the meaning to the brand,” Dickson says. Kreiz flew out, too, and saw Ferrell’s take on him.

While Gerwig’s script has similarities to the earlier one, Mattel’s Barbie brand team saw an important distinction: The doll was no longer the butt of the joke. It was more reflective of their own experience, in which they, a mostly female team, had to agitate with their mostly male managers to change Barbie’s appearance and persona for years without success until sales collapsed. Kreiz says Gerwig was indeed interpreting what had happened with the Barbie brand. “We do enjoy self-deprecation, and we’re happy to play the game,” he says. To the extent that Mattel executives are the target of the jokes, it’s an acknowledgment of past mistakes.

That’s not to say the film will ignore Barbie’s formative paradox. Even as she works to evolve, she looks like the classic blond, pink-bedecked doll of yore. There’s some public mystery, Dickson acknowledges, around how the film and the brand can affirm such values as inclusivity, diversity and empowerment—“and then lo and behold, you have Margot Robbie” as the embodiment of the doll. He professes that the film will address the apparent contradiction. “Wait till you see the movie,” he says.

Then there’s the existential question for Mattel: Will Barbie sell toys? Demand for all toys, including Barbie dolls, boomed during the pandemic, but the industry cooled as lockdown rules were lifted and inflation and economic malaise set in. And while the average customer for Barbie dolls is 3 to 8 years old, the film clearly isn’t for kids—its second teaser trailer included a run of sexual innuendos about how various characters will “beach” each other off, foreshadowing the PG-13 rating it later received. Hasbro got around this with Transformers in part because the movie appealed to nostalgic dads, who in turn bought the toys for their kids. To turn the same trick, Mattel will need to overcome market research showing that, despite Barbie’s recent makeover, there are moms who still bristle at the mention of her, associating her “perfect” body with harm to their girlhood self-confidence.

A feminist and funny Barbie film is therefore not just an apology, but also a sales pitch. The trailer cleverly acknowledges as much, declaring that whether you hate or love Barbie, the film is for you. Schumer herself said on a talk show in June that Gerwig’s version looks “very feminist and cool, so I will be seeing this movie.”

Not to mention, the merch won’t be for kids only: Mattel already has $30 Barbie T-shirts and $15 mugs on its website, and it has more than 100 partnerships lined up. There are Barbie-themed rugs and a Barbie clothing line at the Gap, Barbie roller skates and Barbie dog hats.

Some box-office forecasts have the movie in contention for a $100 million opening weekend. If it becomes a hit, it will buoy the prospects for the 14 other films Mattel has announced. Upcoming releases include a Masters of the Universe film and a live-action Hot Wheels one produced by J.J. Abrams. Movies based on everything from Barney the dinosaur to Magic 8 Ball to UNO are in the works. Mattel even has ones featuring some obsolete IP, including Major Matt Mason, a toy astronaut the company stopped selling in the 1970s, with Paramount Pictures producing and Tom Hanks attached to star.

And if any of those projects sounds like a stretch, well, the expectation from Wall Street of unrelenting growth hasn’t gone away, either. By early last year, Mattel’s market value was sitting at $9 billion, more than double what it was when Kreiz started. With films in the pipeline, the Disney princesses back in the fold and thousands of layoffs completed, last February he declared the company’s turnaround a success and announced it was now in “growth mode.”

At least two private equity firms, Apollo Global Management and L Catterton, approached Mattel about a purchase, though the possibility fell through. Bankers at Apollo, for their part, questioned whether the IP strategy would return the value Mattel said it would, according to a person who was involved in those discussions but wasn’t authorized to speak about them publicly. Analysts expect Barbie sales to remain static in 2023, even with the movie bump, and Mattel’s market value is now down to about $7 billion.

Nevertheless, for Kreiz, opportunities abound. Perhaps he’ll succeed in creating Marvel-style franchises around Barbie and other Mattel properties, turning its customers from mere toy buyers into fans. Kreiz lists new TV shows, digital games and theme park rides as some of the other revenue streams Mattel could create in the wake of a box-office hit. Heck, selling even one Major Matt Mason product would be one more than it’s sold in the past half-century. The studios fund the movies, so the financial downsides are modest and the upsides limitless.

Before Kreiz’s IP strategy can go that far, though, the returns on Barbie’s big star turn will have to come in. “Some people say: ‘Well, we heard that before—let’s wait until you actually have something out,’ ” he says. “We’re about to.” —With Matthew Townsend