Last December, the teaser trailer for Greta Gerwig’s Barbie riffed slyly on the style and vibes of no less than an alpha-male than auteur Stanley Kubrick; here was a dolled-up Margot Robbie as a literal monolith looming over a group of young girls and compelling them to smash their toys in a parody of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The sight gag doubled as a statement of artistic aspiration: it hinted that Gerwig—who wrote Barbie with her husband Noah Baumbach—was trying to craft her blockbuster debut into a step up rather than a sell-out—and also to remake the long-standing Hollywood trope of movies as glorified toy commercials in her own whimsical image.
When 2001 came out in 1968, there was no demand for ape-man plushies or talking HAL dolls, but by 1982—when Kubrick super-fan Steven Spielberg hid the title character of E.T. in plain sight amidst a gaggle of stuffed animals—the demand for cutely reproducible non-human characters had taken hold of the industry. In a high concept decade where the most successful movies were the ones that could be efficiently repackaged across a variety of platforms, producers were suddenly measuring commercial potential in terms of Saturday morning cartoon spin-offs or action figure sales. Meanwhile, the contemporaneous explosion of the home-video market meant even more opportunities to exploit kid-friendly intellectual properties—or create new ones.
For the most part, the adaptations of the ‘80s spoke to alpha-male aspirations: G.I. Joes, He-Men, pizza-scarfing Ninja Turtles. The most potentially profitable protagonist remained on the cinematic sidelines until 2001, when Mattel’s in-house entertainment division released the computer-animated feature Barbie in the Nutcracker on VHS and DVD. The cartoon sold three million copies and earned over $150 million dollars for its studio, yielding a series of fairy-tale sequels. For decades, fans had wondered when the most iconic doll of the 21st Century would be ready for her theatrical debut; with these test runs out of the way, it seemed like an official Barbie movie was just a matter of time.
Of course, there had been a significant Barbie-themed movie back in the 80s, just not one for the doll-buying demographic: Straight out of Bard college, Todd Haynes crafted the forty-three minute DIY indie classic Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987) which portrayed its subject’s tragic life through the use of modified Barbie dolls. Produced and distributed outside mainstream channels, Superstar was an obvious provocation, using a character already indelibly associated with debates over female body image and gender essentialism to embody a real-life celebrity beset by anorexia. Here was pop-cultural satire carved with a (literal) razor’s edge.
A few years later, in 1994, The Simpsons spoofed the media frenzy over a controversial “Teen Talk” Barbie doll programmed to deliver bon mots like “math class is tough” via the classic episode “Lisa vs. Malibu Stacy,” in which the show’s resident idealist bumped up against the sexist legacy of her favorite toy. “Don’t ask me, I’m just a girl,” chirps dead-eyed Malibu Stacy, cheerfully indoctrinating a generation of underage consumers; in response, Lisa Quixotically lends her name to a doll with more progressive values. (“She’ll have the wisdom of Gertrude Stein and the wit of Cathy Guisewite!”)
What Superstar and The Simpsons made clear was that a real 21st century Barbie movie would have to do more than take the character at face value—or, to paraphrase long-time collector Waylon Smithers, not just simply give her a new hat. Originally, Mattel blanched at letting their meal ticket appear as Woody’s girlfriend in the first Toy Story, but ultimately gave Pixar permission to use her in the sequels, where (as voiced by Jodi Benson) she’s a veritable Lisa Lionheart figure, leaving Michael Keaton’s vainglorious clotheshorse Ken to bear the brunt of the filmmakers’ mockery. By 2014, following the success of Philip Lord and Chris Miller’s The Lego Movie—which tweaked the Spielbergian ethos of Toy Story series into a self-reflexive tour of Warner Bros.’ franchise library, with not-so-subliminal advertising and cameos from Speed Racer, Gandalf and Batman—Sony tried to fast-track a film version of Barbie with by a script by Sex and the City writer Jenny Bicks. In a press release, Columbia Pictures executive Hannah Minghella promised that Barbie would establish its namesake as “a truly original screen character,” but it quickly became clear that the movie was in a version of development hell, with multiple competing screenplays and no clear direction.
One of the writers brought on board to shape the material was Diablo Cody, who’d copped an Oscar in 2009 for Juno’s new-slangy screenplay and established herself as a hip, millennial-feminist voice—all of which made it strange when she departed the project in 2018 without even turning in a draft. “I failed so hard at that project,” she told Screen Crush at the time. “I was literally incapable of turning in a Barbie draft. God knows I tried.”
Five years later, Cody has some ideas about what went wrong. “I think I know why I shit the bed,” she tells GQ over the phone from Los Angeles. “When I was first hired for this, I don’t think the culture had not 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.”
Cody remembers feeling like the artistic stakes were high, especially given the relative dearth of female-focused—or driven—IP. “There was a lot of pressure to not write the dramatic equivalent of ‘math is hard,’ she laughs. “I grew up playing with Barbies,” she says, “and those were sort of the first movies that I ever cast. A lot of people learn to tell stories by playing with dolls.” The plan had been to package Cody’s affectionate and idiosyncratic take on the character with an unconventional leading actress—specifically Amy Schumer, whose crass, confessional work as a stand-up and sketch comic gave her a certain counterculture credibility. It was, in theory, a terrific idea, but Cody recalls that the concept was ultimately less liberating than it seemed. “That idea of an anti-Barbie made a lot of sense given the feminist rhetoric of ten years ago,” says Cody. “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.” She cites a recent interview in which Gerwig told Robbie that the key to playing Barbie was a “lack of introspection” as an example of how complex—and contradictory—the material can be.
When Schumer finally dropped out in 2017—citing scheduling conflicts—the role was supposedly shifted to Anne Hathaway, but without much additional traction on the creative side. Cody notes that part of the problem was that The Lego Movie made for a daunting template, having managed so voraciously to have its cake and eat it too in terms of being both a satire and an act of brand extension. “I heard endless references to The Lego Movie in development,” she says, “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.”
Cody says that she’s extremely excited for Gerwig’s Barbie, which she calls “my Joker,” but admits that she’s wary (and weary) of a moment where even the most distinctive and individualistic American filmmakers—including not only Gerwig but also Barry Jenkins, whose pricey Lion King prequel is en route—are being pushed to renovate intellectual property rather than building from the ground up. (The recent announcement that Gerwig will be helming two Chronicles of Narnia movies underscores the issue even more deeply, as do stirrings of an impending Mattel Cinematic Universe). “I understand why those artists have moved into that lane,” Cody says. “I get it. The most successful movie that I’ve ever written was Juno, and that wouldn’t get a theatrical release today.” Her sense of humor about the situation, however, remains intact. “I wish every day that I could write The Paw Patrol movie, because credibility is not going to put my kids through college,” Cody says wryly. “I have made several swings at IP with Barbie and Powerpuff Girls, and I take full responsibility for the failures of those attempts, because I do have a specific voice and POV and I haven’t figured out how to modulate it.” Not that she’s necessarily dying to compromise. “Ultimately, you’re selling toys,” she says. “I mean, nobody really wants to delve deeper into the lore and mythos of Hungry Hungry Hippos. That’s not really an artistic exercise.”