Barbie is looking like a box office beauty, racking up the strongest preview night numbers of the year and heading for a weekend gross that could top $100 million — that could buy Warner Bros. a whole lot of dream houses.
But the Mattel icon’s pink Corvette took a very long road to the big screen, and before writer-director Greta Gerwig, writer Noah Baumbach and star Margot Robbie, there were other top creatives attached to the on-again, off-again project.
Below is a brief history of Barbie’s journey from one of the most popular toys in the world to theaters:
1959. The Barbie fashion doll, created by Ruth Handler, is launched.
Literally 50 years pass.
2009: Mattel, the makers of Barbie, sign a deal with Universal Pictures to make a film about the iconic doll. That deal fell through.
2014: Sony acquired the rights to Barbie. The project saw a series of writers take a crack at the script, including Sex and the City writer Jenny Bicks and Oscar-winning Juno writer Diabo Cody. “I think I know why I shit the bed,” Cody said in a recent GQ interview. “When I was first hired for this, I don’t think the culture had not [sic] embraced the femme or the bimbo as valid feminist archetypes yet. If you look up Barbie on TikTok, you’ll find this wonderful subculture that celebrates the feminine, but in 2014, taking this skinny blonde white doll and making her into a heroine was a tall order … That idea of an anti-Barbie made a lot of sense given the feminist rhetoric of ten years ago. I didn’t really have the freedom then to write something that was faithful to the iconography; they wanted a girl-boss feminist twist on Barbie, and I couldn’t figure it out because that’s not what Barbie is.” Added Cody: “I heard endless references to The Lego Movie in development, and it created a problem for me because they had done it so well. Any time I came up with something meta, it was too much like what they had done. It was a roadblock for me, but now enough time has passed that they can just cast [The Lego Movie antagonist] Will Ferrell as the antagonist in a real-life Barbie movie, and nobody cares.”
2016: Comedian and Trainwreck star Amy Schumer was tapped to star in the live-action Barbie film, and she took a pass at co-writing the script with Kim Caramele. Their idea had been described as a fish-out-of-water tale about a doll played by Schumer who gets kicked out of Barbieland for not being perfect enough.
2017: Schumer dropped out of the project, citing “scheduling conflicts.” She later told The Hollywood Reporter during a 2022 cover story interview that creative differences were at play. Schumer had written Barbie as an ambitious inventor and said the studio asked that Barbie’s invention be a high heel made of Jell-O and was sent a pair of Manolo Blahniks to celebrate. “The idea that that’s just what every woman must want, right there, I should have gone, ‘You’ve got the wrong gal,’” she said. “They didn’t want to do it the way I wanted to do it, the only way I was interested in doing it.” A few months later, Anne Hathaway enlisted for Barbie along with Olivia Milch (Ocean’s 8) and director Alethea Jones (Mrs. Davis). But that version of the project likewise ended up falling apart.
2018: The rights to Barbie shift to Warner Bros.
2019: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Suicide Squad star Margot Robbie was announced as Barbie (and also co-produces the movie through her LuckyChap entertainment banner). There were early rumors Patty Jenkins might direct which didn’t pan out, but Robbie credited Jenkins’ success with 2017’s Wonder Woman for helping Barbie get greenlit. Filmmaker Greta Gerwig (Little Women) jumped on board in July 2021, and teamed with Noah Baumbach (Fantastic Mr. Fox) to write the script. In October, Ryan Gosling (Drive) was cast as Ken. Robbie said that after she first read the script, she thought, “This is so good. What a shame it will never see the light of day, because they are never going to let us make this movie.”
2020-2021: Gerwig and Baumbach write the script, citing influences ranging from Reviving Ophelia to The Red Shoes to Planet of the Apes. The story follows Barbie and Ken as they leave their Barbieland utopia and embark on a journey of self discovery in the real world.
2022. The film is mainly shot at Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden in England. Warner Bros. released the first image of Robbie as the iconic doll and then, a few months later, revealed Ken. The first footage debuted later that year.
2023: Barbie is finished at a cost of $145 million. Warner Bros. ramps up the Barbie mania with a major marketing blitz with a least $70 million in partnerships ranging from Airbnb to Xbox. Among the more notable stunts, was creating a real-life Barbie Dreamhouse in Malibu. First reactions from the film, and its subsequent reviews, are glowing, with the film earning a 90 percent critic and matching audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. As THR put it: “Gerwig delights in the richness and weirdness of her material in this clever send-up of Barbie dolls and their fraught legacy. It’s impressive how much the director, known for her shrewd and narratively precise dramas, has fit into a corporate movie. Barbie is driven by jokes — sometimes laugh-out-loud, always chuckle-worthy — that poke light fun at Mattel, prod the ridiculousness of the doll’s lore and gesture at the contradictions of our sexist society.”
– Tiffany Taylor contributed to this story
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